Robert Scoble Quotes

There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

With respect to the FBI, they had problems communicating in a vertical way, within the FBI itself, so that information of importance could get pushed up to those who were decision-makers.

You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can't make him think.

The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.

When I need things to happen, I need them to happen now, you know. I don't want to be having a meeting about a meeting about a meeting, which is what can happen in Britain.

The minute you're working with the government, you're dealing with bureaucracy, you're dealing with time lags, you're dealing with rigidity, you're dealing with a slow pace.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

When companies get big, they slow down. They're not as exciting. If you want to get something done, it takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

There's a can't-do attitude in this town [Washington DC] that I haven't seen anywhere else ... It's like running through a field of marshmallows in terms of getting anything done.

The problem with the NCAA - it's slow-moving.

I'm not a musical theatre person, and I never will be, especially after seeing the way it operates. It's so incredibly inefficient. It takes three weeks to effect a change. It can be a lighting change, a script change, a musical change - you have to meet with six different departments, and about a month later, it may happen.

Government likes committees... a lot. Committees kill all the really good ideas and generally all the really bad ideas. They produce middle-ground mush.

Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees.

The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.

The only thing that deeply frustrates me is the slow speed [of major labels]. The more people involved, the slower the pace.

Failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision

The best … Committees consist of three persons, two of whom are always absent!

You can't have fifteen people coming together to give the president advice in a Cabinet session. They're all arguing with each other for their own interests and he gets confused. What he decides has to come to him in an orderly way.

Bureaucracies cling to their office space, their secretaries [assistants], their official cars, and their every allotted dollar and personnel position with a tenacity that drowning men might well envy.

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

All corporatism - even when practiced in societies where hard work, enterprise and cooperation are as highly valued as in Korea - encourages inflexibility, discourages individual accountability, and risks magnifying errors by concealing them.

That massiveness of bureaucracy at the VA is chronic and has been chronic.