Walter Wriston Quotes
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Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.
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If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
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Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.
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Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.
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Judgment comes from experience - and experience comes from bad judgment.
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Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted.
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Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.
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Banking is a branch of the information business.
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A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.
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Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.
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The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.
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Risk is not a dirty word.
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All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.
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Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated.
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The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.
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Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don’t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.
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The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.
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A country does not go bankrupt.
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The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.
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One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago.
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The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.
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I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.
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We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: "Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises." So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.
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It is a maxim of cryptology that what one man can devise, another can unravel. This principle keeps armies of tax lawyers and accountants employed, but adds nothing to our national productivity.