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“Scientology, as its critics point out, is unlike any other Western religion in that it withholds key aspects of its central theology from all but its most exalted followers. This would be akin to the Catholic Church telling only a select number of the faithful that Jesus Christ died for their sins.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“In many important ways the book really was an attack on McKinsey thinking, on the idea that the secrets of success could be found in an analytical framework or in a new corporate structure. It was an attack on the rationalist idea that businesses were machines that could be fine-tuned. The work of Peters and Waterman served to remind managers about first principles in business: If they didn’t listen to their customers or employees, then the rest was irrelevant. If the strategy revolution was forcing companies to look outward more than they ever had before, what Excellence did was force that gaze right back inside again. And it wasn’t talking only about financial management. It was also talking about how you treated the people who worked for you. It was, in short, the first great manifesto of the idea of corporate culture.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“As different as Emily Dickinson’s parents’ life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande’s in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they’d raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande’s life to Alice Hobson’s?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“In 1988 two consultants, Jim Rosenthal and Juan Ocampo, wrote Securitization of Credit, a road map that helped Citibank and Chase Manhattan survive the South American debt crisis. The book, the first on a subject that soon washed over the financial world like a tsunami, showed the banks, unable to earn their way out of their bad debt situation, that by securitizing the loans on their books—packaging them up and selling them into the secondary debt markets—they could effectively walk away from the loans, albeit while still taking a hit to their balance sheets.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm