For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.
At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water.
At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.
What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree.
I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy - nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise.
Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.
Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.
Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.
Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.
Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico.
George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.
Ethan Allen was convinced that every planet out there has its own intelligent extraterrestrials. And this, as you can imagine, is a radical, inspiring, but very unsettling, idea.
We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.
In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on.
In business, experience is the big teacher.
We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.
The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true.
