Harvard

"In 1983, Dan’l was asked to solve a big problem for the company. Apple needed to crack the university market, but it had no direct distribution into universities. Dan’l examined Apple’s approach and delivered his verdict: “I need to undo everything you’re doing.” He laid out his terms to Steve, demanding complete control. “Stay out of my way unless I ask for help, and pay me when I’m done,” Dan’l said. Steve agreed. Dan’l built the University Consortium virtually single-handedly, establishing relationships with twenty-four universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan. As he traveled, Dan’l kept hearing the same demand: Professors wanted 3M machines. The term 3M referred to workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and enough processing power to handle a million instructions per second—instructions being the tiny steps a computer takes to get anything done, from adding two numbers to moving a pixel on the screen. The leading laboratories of the day, including Xerox PARC, had released a handful of 3M computers to Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. But the devices were so expensive they had to be donated. Meanwhile, the everyday PCs housed at university departments had one eighth to one third of the 3M’s power—not enough to enable meaningful research advancements. Scientists and researchers were eager to see who would produce the first commercial 3M machine. They wanted to buy them in large numbers and for the price of no more than $10,000 each (about $33,000 in 2026 money). In essence, they hoped to put supercomputer capabilities on individual desks. Despite the lack of a 3M machine, the Apple University Consortium became a massive success, moving nearly fifty thousand units of inventory while Mac retail sales stalled."

"This kind of team spirit in sharing hardship moved me, but it also brought immense pressure. Besides the operators, the foremen even more often asked what could be improved. Production director James Reese appeared on our production line every day, paying special attention to the progress of yield. Reese was one year older than I was, with an MIT bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a Harvard MBA. He quickly became a good colleague and good friend of mine. At that time, the nearly seventy of us were producing almost all scrap every day, yet every week he still wanted to add a few more people. I didn’t understand and argued with him. He said we should first hire enough operators and train their basic skills; once the yield made a breakthrough, we would have large quantities of product. Later developments proved he was right. A few months later the yield leapt forward, and we already had enough well-trained operators on the line. So in a short time, we not only made up the deliveries that should have been made but were not during the low-yield period, we also smoothly met IBM’s rapidly increasing demand."

"As if there were some force arranging things in the dark, Mr. Morris Chang’s third uncle, with foresight, first chose a year at Harvard for him, rather than immediately entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which most directly matched his specialty. In his year at Harvard, he immersed himself almost in all directions in Western civilization: from Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Austen, and Shaw, to Churchill’s World War II memoirs and the speeches of successive U.S. presidents; at the same time he subscribed to major American newspapers and periodicals, listened to music, watched theater, visited museums, attended ball games and dances, and made American friends."

"In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine."

"My time at Sylvania can be said to have been the beginning of my fervent learning of semiconductor technology. After spending the first few months focusing on Shockley’s Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, most of what I learned came from academic papers published at the time or from my daily R&D work. Fortunately, my new boss held a Harvard PhD and was quite proficient in transistor theory, which benefited me greatly. Starting in 1956, I began attending semiconductor academic conferences at least two or three times a year. In December 1956, I published my first semiconductor paper, and in 1957 I published two more papers. In hindsight, these papers were insignificant, but they helped quite a bit in raising my standing inside and outside the company."

"Just as the literary giant Hemingway described Paris as “a moveable feast,” I describe my year at Harvard the same way. After that, I went through various stages—MIT, employment, entering Stanford for a Ph.D., and working at Texas Instruments—but no matter where I went or what I did, I carried this “feast” with me and continually enjoyed the knowledge, interests, and insights that this “feast” gave me. Even decades later, when I returned to Taiwan, although changes in time and place made it feel as if I were in another world, this “feast” still did not lose its freshness. It was as though I were still immersed in a rich, ever-changing, refined, and captivating atmosphere."

"He likes to quote Hemingway’s words, describing what he gained at Harvard as “a moveable feast,” and believes that this feast nourished his entire life, including the technological work he engaged in that seemed to have little to do with the humanities, up to today."

"To carry out this strategy, at the very moment when François Pinault came to trample his garden, he created Europ@ web, a holding company, also of Dutch law, responsible for overseeing most of the group's European internet activities, which he entrusted to Chahram Becharat, thirty-two years old, a precision intellectual mechanic trained at Polytechnique and Harvard, recruited a little earlier. He surrounded himself with about fifty young wolves who left their consulting firms and investment banks without looking back, trading their comfortable salaries for promises of capital gains. With a fund of 500 million euros (3.28 billion francs), Europ@ web will acquire about fifty "dotcoms". The methods are those that financial power allows in the face of excited and naive kids."

"The Original lululemon Manifesto (2003) (these were the quotes on the side of the lululemon shopping bags) Coke, Pepsi and other pops will be known as the cigarettes of the future. Colas are NOT a substitute for water. Colas are just another cheap drug made to look great by advertising. Drink fresh water and as much water as you can. Water flushes unwanted toxins and keeps your brain sharp. Love. Do yoga. It lets you live in the moment and stretching releases toxins from your muscles. Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself. Do one thing a day that scares you. Sunscreen absorbed into the skin might be worse than no sunshine. Get the right amount of sunshine. Listen, listen, listen and then ask strategic questions. Life is full of setbacks. Success is determined by how you handle setbacks. Compliments from the heart elevate another person’s spirit and will often result in an encouraging word for someone else—a domino effect. Write down your short and long-term GOALS four times a year. A class study at Harvard found only 3% of the students had written goals. 20-years later, the same 3% were wealthier than the other 97% combined. A daily hit of athletic-induced endorphins will give you the power to make better decisions and help you be at peace with yourself. Let SWEAT FLOW from your pores once a day to regenerate your skin. Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to. One hour of aerobic exercise will release endorphins to regenerate cells and offset stress. Wake up and realize you are surrounded by amazing friends. Communication is COMPLICATED. Remember that each person is raised in a different family with a slightly different definition of every word. An agreement is an agreement only if each party knows the conditions for satisfaction and a time is set for satisfaction to occur. Friends are more important than money. Live near the ocean and inhale the pure salt air that flows over the water. Vancouver will do nicely. Do not use cleaning chemicals on your kitchen counters. Try vinegar and lemon. Someone will inevitably make a sandwich on your counter. Stress is related to 99% of all illnesses. Don’t trust that an old-age pension will be sufficient. Do yoga so you can remain active in physical sports as you age. Observe a plant before and after watering and notice the benefits water can have on your body and your brain. You ALWAYS have a choice and the conscious brain can only hold one thought at a time. Utilize your freedom to choose. Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you have them. Children are the orgasm of life. Lululemon athletica was formed to provide people with components to live a longer, healthier and more fun life. If we can produce products to keep people active and stress free, we believe the world will be a better place. DO IT NOW. The world is changing AT SUCH A RAPID rate that waiting to implement changes…"

"Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “[Sue the bastards!](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor287)” (referring to government agencies). Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems."

"Charles Koch invited one of the brightest young business consultants in the nation to speak in Wichita, a Harvard professor named Michael Porter. Porter published a book in 1980 called Competitive Strategy that offered a new framework for how to run a business. The book provided a detailed plan for companies to analyze the market in which they operated. Porter visited Koch Industries multiple times, accompanied by a team of consultants. The team helped Koch’s managers look into their own business lines and apply Porter’s ideas, using good data to figure out the best path toward boosting profits and growing. Porter helped Koch executives learn how to analyze their competitive advantage, analyze their competitors, and come up with the best plan to capitalize on the company’s market position."

"Our global MBA program draws qualified candidates from such top business schools as Harvard, Stanford, Chicago-Booth, MIT Sloan, Columbia, Wharton and Kellogg in the U.S., as well as London Business School and IESE in Europe and CEIBS in Hong Kong. In 2014, we selected 21 MBAs for the program from a pool of 642 applicants."

"Building on a long-forgotten or neglected legacy of technique from classical antiquity, with additions imported by the so-called barbarians, or acquired from more advanced cultures to the east, they succeeded in developing by the fourteenth century—certainly by the fifteenth—a corpus of knowledge and skills that not only put them far ahead of their teachers, but conferred on them a decisive superiority of power. It is on this basis that Europe changed from a hapless victim to global aggressor, from a poor backwater, obliged to make its balance of payments in slaves for want of marketable exports, to the affluent workshop of the world. —David Landes (1924–2013), Harvard economic historian"

"In 1980, Shenzhen was a fishing village of fewer than 70,000 people. But as a special economic zone just across the harbor from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the area around it underwent a metamorphosis. “By the late 1980s, the entire 104-mile route from Hong Kong to Guangzhou was lined on both sides with factories,” according to the late Ezra Vogel, a Harvard scholar and the biographer of Deng Xiaoping. By 1990 the city of Shenzhen had a population of 1.7 million; in the early 2000s, it had grown to around 7 million. In just twenty-five years, Shenzhen’s population grew a hundredfold."

"Later that spring, Mix heard the rumor that Feder’s counterpart at Harvard would come to Stockholm to meet competitor Nordic Capital. Mix acted lightning fast. He called up and invited Peter Dolan to dinner in one of Operakällaren’s secluded smaller dining rooms upstairs. The dinner went well, and Harvard also chose to invest in Altor’s first fund. In May 2003, in the record time of three months, Mix had gathered the 650 million euros that was the target; in addition to the pension foundations of Harvard and Princeton, he also brought along Yale’s university endowment, a total of about fifty investors. – At IK, we worked a lot with “shotgun wedding” when looking for investors, meaning we marketed ourselves very broadly. When I started Altor, I did the opposite, he says. Altor has stuck to that strategy. It works as long as things go well; you call old investors when setting up a new fund and ask if they want to join, and if they are satisfied, they say yes. Therefore, it is difficult for new investors to get into the best venture capital firms, their funds quickly become “pre-booked”."

"So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized? Physics, for example, is a real major at all major universities, and it’s set in its ways. The opposite of physics might be astrology, but astrology doesn’t matter. What about something like nutrition? Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic."

"A half century ago, the great Harvard scholar Joseph A. Schumpeter predicted that capitalism, because of its very success in raising the standard of living to unprecedented heights, would weaken the institutions necessary for its survival, giving way to a centralized, socialized bureaucracy of intellectuals which would exploit the productive capacity created by private enterprise"

"Eventually, and quite late, I realized what the game—because it was a game—was all about. There were good reasons why many Harvard students were quickly dismissed from their first job. We needed to learn the hard way that communication is everything."

"I really enjoyed writing and the columnist role I had from 1963–64. Having opinions and arguing was something I was trained in, not least from Harvard, and it has always been important for me to test the boundaries of my own thoughts and to try them out in encounters with others' views and experiences. It was also interesting and educational to see how I became profiled on journalism's own commercial terms. When I later became chairman of the Swedish Shareholders' Association for a couple of years, I fit well into the metaphor of David and Goliath, with my timely image of us shareholders forming "village assemblies" and starting a grassroots movement against concentration of power in business. It made for good headlines."

"Elisabeth and I persevered. Her salary paid for the food, and my stock trading covered the costs for studies and housing. Afterwards, I have often felt great joy that we managed Harvard together. It is unfortunate when one has not shared the struggles in life, especially when the reward for the effort comes as a shared blessing. After we had been married for a month, I thought it was time to celebrate with a bit of luxury for dinner, but I forgot an important detail. I rushed back to the supermarket and met Elisabeth. "Where are you going?" she asked. "To the grocery store," I answered, "I'm going to buy mayonnaise." To my surprise, she burst into loud laughter. She had the same thought but hadn't forgotten the mayonnaise. Four lobsters worked well too—and thereafter we celebrated our wedding anniversary every month with lobster, which was very cheap in New England. Thinking the same thought simultaneously is something she and I often do and marvel at even today, after more than fifty years of marriage."

"My professional life began after returning from Harvard. By then, my mother-in-law had already asked me if I could support Elisabeth. I replied that I thought she was going to support me, and my mother-in-law burst into one of her big laughs. But my father-in-law was worried about our finances because he couldn't afford to support us. In previous generations, it had been common for "young people" not to receive any significant salary at the beginning of their working life. This was especially true in government service. But now, times were different."

"Harvard's study methodology was phenomenal and suited me. It was about reality, solving concrete problems, and gaining the best theoretical experiences. Case analyses were ongoing all the time. It was truly liberating to know that there was never just one correct analysis—a problem could be solved in different ways. But there was one conclusion that was almost always wrong: It was not right to dismiss someone even if the problem seemed to lie there. If the subject was Production, it was not necessarily the case that the course of action was strictly about Production. It often happened that the class discussion steamed in a certain direction for almost an hour until someone made a contribution that immediately got everyone to cheerfully steer in a completely new direction. Some of the classmates were truly brilliant, and it felt like a privilege to listen to them. The joy of experiencing others' brilliance undisturbed by personal envy is very enriching and was an important component for the future."

"Stokes suspected intuitively what Knox knew from experience: the best way to do business in Asia was to use local customs. ‘We were very conscious in Asia of always collecting the money [for the goods distributed],’ says Stokes. The only safe system was the Asian one of having people physically collect owed money on time, like a landlord knocking on doors for rent. The Singaporeans ignored their own hard-won wisdom and tried to introduce the latest Western methods, employing a Harvard graduate who put in an American payment system. It didn’t work. It was a lesson that when in Asia, do as the locals do, something Stokes would remember in China much later."