Michael Bergdahl Quotes

At Wal-Mart, if you couldn't explain an idea or a concept in simple terms on one page of paper Sam Walton considered the new idea too complicated to implement.
Michael Bergdahl

Sam Walton instilled ownership of the products in the stores into the collective consciousness of every associate regardless of what job they did for the company.
Michael Bergdahl

Sam Walton was a master storyteller who used illustrative stories to reinforce his cultural standards.
Michael Bergdahl

Sam Walton's values are: treat the customer right, take care of your people, be honest in your dealings, pass savings along to the customer, keep things simple, think small, control costs and continuously improve operations.
Michael Bergdahl

Servant leadership is the foundation and the secret of Sam Walton's ability to achieve team synergy.
Michael Bergdahl

The key to competing and surviving against Wal-Mart is to focus your business into a niche or pocket where you can leverage your strengths in the local marketplace.
Michael Bergdahl

The key to Operations at Wal-Mart is their ability to maintain the highest standards while at the same time getting things done with lockstep execution.
Michael Bergdahl

Wal-Mart hires average people but squeezes above average performance and results out of them.
Michael Bergdahl

Wal-Mart's success strategies and tactics are easy to understand yet hard to duplicate.
Michael Bergdahl

When you compete with Wal-Mart, even if you think you've found a niche don't ever become complacent.
Michael Bergdahl

Timothy Garton Ash Quotes

A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.
Timothy Garton Ash

After saying yes to Turkey, the EU is having difficulty finding clear and consistent grounds for saying no to other, still more remote candidates - but being in the general vicinity of Europe does seem to be a continuing requirement.
Timothy Garton Ash

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy.
Timothy Garton Ash

Canadians tend to be a bit more religious than most Europeans - though not more than the Poles or Ukrainians. Most important, their attitude to immigration and ethnic minorities is more positive than that of most Europeans.
Timothy Garton Ash

Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.
Timothy Garton Ash

I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime.
Timothy Garton Ash

I love this country, but the union jack leaves me cold.
Timothy Garton Ash

No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.
Timothy Garton Ash

Nuclear proliferation - the proliferation of WMDs altogether - is one of the greatest dangers of our time.
Timothy Garton Ash

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
Timothy Garton Ash

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.
Timothy Garton Ash

The key to the survival of liberty in the modern world is the embrace of multiple identities.
Timothy Garton Ash

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.
Timothy Garton Ash

Yet another thing Canadians and Europeans have in common is an obsession with the United States, and with distinguishing themselves from it, often by crude stereotyping.
Timothy Garton Ash

Paddy Ashdown Quotes

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.
Paddy Ashdown

I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do.
Paddy Ashdown

I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.
Paddy Ashdown

I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.
Paddy Ashdown

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.
Paddy Ashdown

I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.
Paddy Ashdown

I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold.
Paddy Ashdown

I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.
Paddy Ashdown

I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
Paddy Ashdown

It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations.
Paddy Ashdown

It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.
Paddy Ashdown

It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.
Paddy Ashdown

It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.
Paddy Ashdown

Maybe it's legitimate criticism, though it can be hurtful. Maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention to the people with whom I would have a natural affinity as a liberal, and they feel let down by that.
Paddy Ashdown

My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.
Paddy Ashdown

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is compromise.
Paddy Ashdown

The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?
Paddy Ashdown

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.
Paddy Ashdown