Standardization Quotes

To measure is to know. If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept..

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

Among the reasons for this was the fact that the U.S.A. is one mass market. It is only when you have a mass market that large-scale manufacturing which involves very substantial expenditures can be justified.

When General Motors builds a car, they want to meet the specific needs of many customers. But if they custom-make each car, then it will not be economical.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.

You can't create a mass market if you don't have a common standard.

If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

What's the problem you solve? Solve it for one person. Create a system to do it without you. Duplicate.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

The most important rule of bureaucracy is never be wrong and alone.

Open rules! Open standards! Open findings! Open precedents!

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

The world needs more standardization, less innovation.

The smell of the carpet in a hotel room is the same everywhere.

So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.

The establishment of the militia, of a mint, of standards of weights and measures, of the post office and post roads are subjects which I presume you will resume of course, and which are abundantly urged by their own importance.

Innovators are developing the ideas and bringing them to life in amazing new applications. All we, as an industry, need to do now is focus on standardizing the interfaces to ensure interoperability - and stand out of the way.