Simon Sinek Quotes
My concern is that we live in an economy in which stabbing someone and waiting for them to complain before we remove the knife has become the normal way of doing business. When did we lose sight of the fact that it's not nice to stab people in the first place?
Sinek, Simon. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't. Portfolio, 2014, p. 102.
Blinken was illustrating that entering the global market, was practical only when the societal infrastructure such as banks, laws, courts, regulatory authorities have been put in place.
Webster was taking regular bribes from large corporations and even complained when his payments were late. So he might have had a pro-large business bias. At the time taking bribes even if there was a quid pro quo was not illegal or even “unethical” by then Congressional rules.
While Powell intended the statement as an insult, Nader and most of the consumer movement considered it a profound compliment. The result was that the statement was quoted frequently.
See {586119} for an earlier English version of this point.
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Simon Oliver Sinek is a British-American author and inspirational speaker. He is the author of five books, including Start With Why (2009) and The Infinite Game (2019).
