Every Managerial Act Must Be Seen As

I Used To Be Skeptical When Educators And Technologists Predicted That We May Be Entering A New Era Of Oral Culture, In Which Audible Information Will Be At Least As Important As Visible Information. Now That I Have Adopted Into My Own Daily Life A Device That Makes Music And Spoken-word Files Easy To Access From Anywhere, I Have Tempered My Skepticism.

Power Lies In The Details, And The Tenacious Pursuit Of Such Hidden Levers Can Pay Off Enormously. While You Don't Want To Get A Reputation As A Prissy Worrywart, Worrying About The Details In Private Is Important. You May Think You Are The World's Greatest Speaker, But If The Auditorium's Sound System Is Singing Static - Well, Forget It.

A Vibrant, Rich, Growing Corpus Of Public-domain Books Is A Vital Public Good - Similar To Parks, The Infrastructure Of Basic Services, And Other Hallmarks Of Any Advanced Society.

But There's No Substitute For Getting Smarter Faster. And The Way You Get Smarter Is To Screw Around Vigorously. Try Stuff. See What Works. See What Fails Miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

Hire Disrespectful People.