Industrial Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service... The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.

W. Edwards Deming

An objective of O. R. as it emerged from this evolution of industrial organization, is to provide managers of the organizations with a scientific basis for solving problems involving the interaction of the components of the organization in the best interest of the organization as a whole. A decision which is best for the organization as a whole is called optimum decision.

C. West Churchman

I have lived in the United States and I know the might of their industrial complex. The United States is a sleeping giant and I am afraid that our attack has awakened it.

Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don't understand how human beings learn and create... Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional inputs into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.

Most work serves the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion and can be abolished outright. The rest can be automated away and/or transformed — by the experts, the workers who do it — into creative, playlike pastimes whose variety and conviviality will make extrinsic inducements like the capitalist carrot and the Communist stick equally obsolete. In the hopefully impending meta-industrial revolution, libertarian communists revolting against work will settle accounts with libertarians and Communists working against revolt. And then we can go for the gusto!

Organizational theories have three origins: Max Weber's original work on bureaucracies which came to define the theory for sociologists, a line of theory based in business schools that had as its focus, the improvement of management control over the work process, and the industrial organization literature in economics. Unlike many fields in sociology, organizational theory has been a multidisciplinary affair since World War II, and it is difficult to understand its central debates without considering its linkages to business schools and economics departments.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

The need of conspicuous waste... stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods.

Thorstein Veblen

I am trying to convince people—not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power—that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation... Advancing a frontier—history has shown—has advanced a culture ever since the industrial revolution got underway.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

Herbert Marcuse

In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may be assumed, will oppose any reform which interferes with the supply of cheap juvenile labour.

This war was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.

If there is to be peace in our industrial life, let the employer recognize his obligation to his employees - at least to the degree set forth in existing statutes.

Creating a system to protect industrial and intellectual property is a prerequisite for the transfer of technology and consequently the resurgence of national technologies.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

Internationally, the Echelon program, created by the United States and the UK during the Cold War, seems to have been converted into industrial espionage, according to the French government agencies, by combining traditional eavesdropping and interference of telecommunications, with interception of electronic messages.

Manuel Castells

Organization aims to unite individuals into a body which shall work together for a common end. Specifically, organization prepares for the transaction of business by electing and appointing officers and committees, delegating authorities and bringing into systematic connection and cooperation, each and every part of the industrial body. Right organization, in short, puts vitality into the entire factory, secures the efficient working-together of all employees, from the manager's office to the mechanic's bench, routes materials, sub-divides work, inspects output and delivers the right goods, fully processed, at the shipping room door on the correct delivery date.

Clinton Edgar Woods

To come to an understanding of the source and origin of this margin of disposable revenue that goes to the earnings of corporate capital, it is necessary to come to an understanding of the industrial system out of which the disposable margin of revenue arises. Productive industry yields a margin of net product over cost, counting cost in terms of man power and material resources; and under the established rule of self-help and free bargaining as it works out in corporation finance, this margin of net product has come to rest upon productive industry as an overhead charge payable to anonymous outsiders who own the corporation securities.

Thorstein Veblen

Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.

On the eve of the industrial revolution there were on every side signs of political change. But the French Revolution frightened statesmen, and political reform in England was delayed for nearly half a century.

Canada came under the sweep of the Industrial Revolution at one stroke whereas the western movement of the United States was a gradual development. There are no transcontinental railroads controlled by one organization in the United States. In Canada transcontinental roads are distinct entities controlled in eastern Canada. Similarly in financial institutions the branch bank system with its headquarters in the east has been typical of Canada but not of the United States. No such tendency toward unity of structure in institutions and toward centralized control as found in Canada can be observed in the United States.

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

It is quite evident that the Soviet system today represents the exact opposite of almost everything that the left in the West is striving for - obsessive state secrecy rather than freedom of information, centralised bureaucratic control instead of devolved decision making and public accountability, total state power over the individual as opposed to inalienable civil liberties, authoritarian economic management rather than trade union freedom and industrial democracy, and a government-manipulated media instead of greater diversity and choice in news and information sources.

As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace.

Thorstein Veblen

For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products.