Walter Wriston Quotes

The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.

Risk is not a dirty word.

If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.

Rising prices or wages do not cause inflation; they only report it. They represent an essential form of economic speech, sincemoney isjust another form of information.

The guy with the competitive advantage is the one with the best technology.

Banking is a branch of the information business.

It is a maxim of cryptology that what one man can devise, another can unravel. This principle keeps armies of tax lawyers and accountants employed, but adds nothing to our national productivity.

There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.

Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don’t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.

Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.

Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible ... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.

All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.

We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: "Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises." So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

When you retire you go from Who's Who to Who's That?

As long as capital-both human and money-can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.

Information about money is more important than money itself.

A country does not go bankrupt.

Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, "We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead."

All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.

Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted.

I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.

The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.

Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.

One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago.

Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.

The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.

A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.

The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.