It’s seldom that you come across a book, where you are compelled to read the first page several times. It’s not that the text is tough to comprehend, it is meaningful enough to read many times to imbibe what it says. Highly recommend ‘Men and rubber’ – Harvey Firestone.

From the book…

‘Thomas A Edison sums it up this way: There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking’…

For the most difficult thing in business is first getting yourself to thinking and then getting others to thinking. I say this is difficult because, in the natural course of business’s, an infinite number of details come up every day, and it is very easy indeed to keep so busy with these details that no time is left over for hard, quiet thought – for thinking through from beginning to the end.

An executive cannot grandly dismiss details. Business is made up of details, and I notice that the CEO who dismisses them is quite as likely as not to dismiss his business…

A man may keep very busy indeed without doing any thinking at all, and the easy course – the course of least resistance is to keep so busy that there will be no time left over for thought. Almost every man tries to dodge thought or to find a substitute for it. We try to buy thoughts ready made and guaranteed to fit, in the shape of systems installed by experts. We try to substitute discussion for thought by organizing committees; a committee may function very well indeed as a clearing house for thoughts, but more commonly a committee organization is just an elaborate means of rolling one’s self into believing that a spell spent in talking is the same as a spell spent in thinking.

The above are some lines from the first page – have been reading them over and over the last few days. Am compelled to reflect and unwilling to move on – feel like I need to read them again.