"Information, that is imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained." (William Playfair, "The Commercial and Political Atlas", 1786)
"The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides." (Henri-Frédéric Amiel, [journal entry] 1856)
"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." (Winston Churchill, [Speech, House of Commons] 1925)
"Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer - not by guess and by God." (Lyndall Urwick, "The Pattern of Management", 1956)
"In most management problems there are too many possibilities to expect experience, judgement, or intuition to provide good guesses, even with perfect information." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)
"In the objectives system, the corporation's aims, or plans, are broken down into a hierarchy of lesser aims or plans; and the grand total of all those objectives adds up to those of the corporation. Then all the executives have to do is meet their planned and agreed objectives and - hey presto - the corporation does the same. Perfection in management, at last, has arrived, except that it hasn't and won't." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"You can teach the rudiments of cooking, as of management, but you cannot make a great cook or a great manager. In both activities, you ignore fundamentals at grave risk - but sometimes succeed. In both, science can be extremely useful but is no substitute for the art itself. In both, inspired amateurs can outdo professionals. In both, perfection is rarely achieved, and failure is more common than the customers realize. In both, practitioners don't need recipes that detail timing down to the last second, ingredients to the last fraction of an ounce, and procedures down to the Just flick of the wrist; they need reliable maxims, instructive anecdotes, and no dogmatism." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)
"So we pour in data from the past to fuel the decision-making mechanisms created by our models, be they linear or nonlinear. But therein lies the logician's trap: past data from real life constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand. [...] It is in those outliers and imperfections that the wildness lurks." (Peter L Bernstein, "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk", 1996)
"A belief model is clung to not because it is 'correct' - there is no way to know this - but rather because it has worked in the past and must cumulate a record of failure before it is worth discarding. In general, there may be a constant slow turnover of hypotheses acted upon. One could speak of this as a system of temporarily fulfilled expectations - beliefs or models or hypotheses that are temporarily fulfilled" (though not perfectly), which give way to different beliefs or hypotheses when they cease to be fulfilled." (W Brian Arthur, "Complexity and the Economy", 2015)
"Sometimes, the best way to broaden your search is to look inside your own organization. Great solutions often come along at the wrong time, and the sprint can be a perfect opportunity to rejuvenate them. Also look for ideas that are in progress but unfinished - and even old ideas that have been abandoned." (Jake Knapp et al, "Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days", 2016)
"Professional organizations had believed that by hiring well qualified, technically capable people, quality control would take care of itself. [...] Managers rationalized that quality control lapses could not be helped and were simply another cost of doing business. Now wasn't the only perfectionist in the university business." (Garth Peterson)
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