Institutional Knowledge Quotes

The longer you're here [in Congress] the better seniority looks.

What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped.

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Now, for this book I had to learn the world of the Senate, which is really for all that's written about the Senate, an unknowing world and its mores, and the way things work with subcommittees and all. I loved learning about that.

I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.

Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

The permanent institutional expertise class is now no longer the legislators, it's the lobbyists who don't have term limits and are there forever.

There's a learning curve to understanding how the Senate operates.

The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.

A lot of knowledge in any kind of an organization is what we call task knowledge. These are things that people who have been there a long time understand are important, but they may not know how to talk about them. It's often called the culture of the organization.

You have to understand government and you have to understand how hard it is.

Liverpool is one of the great institutions of the world, and you understand that when you see it from the outside, but you only really get to know when you go inside as manager.

Every institution is perfectly capable of forgetting what it has learned in three years.

Being a freshman Senator, you spend your first 18 months just trying to find out how the Senate works.

Knowledge is the distilled essence of our institutions, corroborated by experience.

When coaches arrive at a club, we need to understand its history. If we don't understand it, then we are destined to have a bad time.

The professional permanent staff that lies right beneath them will still be in place, making everything work until the [Donald] Trump appointees start populating the offices on top of them.

I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.

As a former home secretary, I have access to and knowledge of the workings of the system in a way that individuals unfamiliar with the courts can never hope to have.

The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

A lot of these teams really forget that part of success comes with having veteran leadership. You see a lot of teams forget that and start letting go of these old veterans. They don't realize how important it is to have a veteran voice in your locker room or on the bench. It's important to have guys who have been there before.

It makes sense in that environment that you would hold on in the U.S. government to the people who know their way around this particular block.