Charles Fishman > Quotes

“What NASA did for semiconductor companies was teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes, and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Reihm wasn’t thrilled by the Moon walk that he and his colleagues had worked for years to make possible; he was thrilled by its being over,”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart can't seem to grasp an essential fact: in 2006, the company has exactly the reputation it has earned. No, we don't give the company adequate credit for low prices. But the broken covenant Sam Walton had with how to treat store employees, the relentless pressure that hollows out companies and dilutes the quality of their products, the bullying of suppliers and communities, the corrosive secrecy, the way Wal-Mart has changed our own perception of price and quality, of value and durability--none of these is imaginary, or trivial, or easily changed with a fresh set of bullet points, an impassioned speech, and a website heavy with "Wal-Mart facts".

If Wal-Mart does in fact double the gas mileage of its truck fleet, and thereby double the gas mileage of every long-haul truck in America, that will be huge. It will change gas consumption in the United States in a single stroke. But it hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, it will not make Wal-Mart a good company or a good corporate partner or a good corporate citizen.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again.”
― Charles Fishman

“didn’t usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age. And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been. Probably more valuable.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart benefits from the impression that globalization is some kind of unmanageable economic weather system out of the control of everyone, affecting all players with indifference, benefiting those who happened to be properly prepared.”
― Charles Fishman

“Kennedy had vowed to do something that, at that moment, couldn’t be done. Eight years later—eight years and two months—one astronaut was orbiting the Moon, and two were bouncing around on the surface. In eight years the spaceships were imagined, designed, constructed, tested, and then test-flown. The astronauts were chosen and learned to fly those spaceships, practicing so relentlessly that the routine procedures became instinctive. The spacesuits were designed and sewn; the problem of flying back through the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour without burning up was solved; a small group of determined engineers managed to get an electric car designed, built, and added to the flight manifest.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy’s press conferences were full-dress affairs. He prepared the night before with briefing books laying out 20 to 30 likely questions and their answers, and did a practice run-through with senior staff the following morning. The press conferences were either in late afternoon or early evening, and Kennedy typically took a nap beforehand. So many reporters wanted to cover them that they were held at the auditorium at the U.S. State Department. The smallest gathering for the first eight was 297 reporters.8”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“First, NASA used integrated circuits—the first computer chips—in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits, and for years in the 1960s NASA was the largest customer for them, buying most of the chips made in the country.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-mart has done such a superb job of austerity, from start to finish, that austerity is all that's left.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“A single AGC like the one on Eagle that Armstrong and Aldrin were using had 3,840 bytes of erasable memory, what we call random access memory (RAM) today. It had 69,120 bytes of fixed memory, or read-only memory (ROM).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“We want clean air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world. Yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“For all the folks whose job it was to be ready for [Hurricane] Katrina, but who weren't, from the Oval Office, right down the chain of command to the New Orleans police department, Wal-Mart was a vivid reproach.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Out of frustration and political necessity, he concluded that the only way to reassert American leadership in space wasn’t with individual launches or steadily matching Soviet achievements or patient explanations of the sophistication of American satellite technology. Kennedy wanted a single leap that was distinctly American in ambition.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“How many companies can say that the amount of customers who use their services second most often, and spend the second most amount of money with them, are “very negative”?”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Please go back up”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“When NASA designed the Real-Time Computer Complex for Mission Control in Houston, it specified that the machines needed to operate for 336 hours (14 days) with “up-time” reliability of 99.95 percent, which would have allowed for 10 minutes of downtime in two weeks. In its bid to provide the computers—which was ultimately successful—IBM said it could guarantee only 97.12 percent reliability, meaning nearly 10 hours of downtime during a 14-day spaceflight. (That level of “up-time” wasn’t even as good as what had been provided during Glenn’s flight.)42”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Sometimes cheap is inexpensive. Sometimes it's cheap.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“One thing made the Polaris missiles and subs possible: precision inertial navigation, provided by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Each submarine had to have an inertial navigation system so it knew where it was. And each missile also had an inertial navigation unit to guide it from its submerged launch platform to its target.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The race to the Moon”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart's business in the United States is stagnating, growing only because the company continues to relentlessly open new stores. But if Wal-Mart takes environmental responsibility seriously, if its stores become models for energy conservation and for doing minimal environmental harm (they are known for the opposite right now), that will be pioneering, and it might also be attractive to some Americans who have avoided Wal-Mart. If those stores are filled with products made by factory workers who are treated in a civilized fashion, products that do not damage the environment in the course of being made, products made in sustainable ways with minimal packaging,
that will represent a pivot point, not just for Wal-Mart, or for retailing, but for capitalism. Nothing could do more to jump-start Wal-Mart's business than for Wal-Mart to find its soul.

And of course, Wal-Mart's scale means that if it starts to take the design of its buildings and the impact of its products seriously, all its competitors will have no choice but to do the same. The virtuous Wal-Mart effect would ripple widely. It would ripple around the world.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“It was a remarkable dinner nonetheless, because three or four years into the future, Kennedy would make possible the most significant achievement to come from Draper’s work—a Moon landing—and Draper’s work would make possible the most dramatic legacy of Kennedy’s presidency: that same Moon landing. But at that first dinner Draper came away with the distinct impression that John Kennedy didn’t know that much about space and didn’t care that much about it.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Who better than Wal-Mart, after all, to make a kilowatt of electricity go twice as far, or a gallon of fuel move our trucks move three times the distance?" -Wal-Mart ad”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“The typical American flushes the toilet five times a day at home, and uses 18.5 gallons (70 liters) of water, just for that.5”
― Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

“the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings—like the explorers of the 1700s from the deck of a ship—and cross-check their computer’s navigation. The guts of the computer were stitched together by women using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: the heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and also folded by hand.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart is so large, its reach so great, that it has created an ecosystem in which its suppliers and competitors, and their suppliers and competitors, and their customers, all operate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets the rules, of that ecosystem. Wal-Mart has inexorably changed our expectations as shoppers—and the Wal-Mart effect also extends to consumers who never shop at Wal-Mart. Likewise, Wal-Mart has reshaped the companies that supply it—and it has also reset the pace and the competitive landscape even for companies that try to do business outside the Wal-Mart ecosystem.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“And, of course, water is the most important substance in our lives because we ourselves are made mostly of water—men are typically 60 percent water, women are typically 55 percent water. A 150-pound man is 90 pounds of water (11 gallons).4”
― Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

“It was 76 days after President Kennedy’s “go to the Moon” speech. MIT had submitted its formal proposal to run navigation and guidance for the Moon mission just five days before, on August 4.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon