An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive in the long run.

Pragmatism … reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

"This is a culture that is very hostile to complacency," said one executive. "We have an itch that what we just accomplished, no matter how great, is never going to be good enough to sustain us," said another.

I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will — all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.

Then he decided that nothing was more impractical than misplaced practicality.

A posture of enthusiasm is not always the one best calculated to succeed.

ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency.

One of the major barriers to productive thinking is the almost compulsive drive in most business organizations to be right.

The danger is that executives will become contemptuous of information and stimulus that cannot be reduced to computer logic and computer language. Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.

The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

If good people are asked to work in a bad culture, one in which leaders do not relinquish control, then the odds of something bad happening go up. People will be more concerned about following the rules out of fear of getting in trouble or losing their jobs than doing what needs to be done. And when that happens, souls will be lost.