mother

""I rolled the 'r's, I had an accent. They made me feel that I was dressed poorly. I was met with sneers and ridicule. I did not accept it. They didn't make fun of me for long. I was not the strongest, but I was the most fighter. I discovered young people who, undoubtedly because of their bourgeoisie attitude, were convinced they were in the right place, acting as they should and treating those who did not belong to their environment as a slightly inferior race. We were allowed to go out once a month with our parents. I remember when my mother came to pick me up in the visiting room with her basket, dressed as a peasant, they ridiculed her." As long as one knows him, they could hear how these humiliations were indelible and have marked his future behaviour, but, what mattered most, was that the taste for revenge did not lead him to regret or bitterness, on the contrary to conquest, not to make a place among those who excluded him, but to surpass them by applying other rules of conduct than their own."

"Yasujiro was four (five by the Japanese way of reckoning) when his mother left him at the end of the bridge. To the end of his days he never forgot that desolate moment when he stood, abandoned, watching her walk away. The image was for ever etched into his memory. For the little child it was an experience that was to shape the whole of his life."

"For those who can now never think of me as anything other than a boss, I have to say I was a better-than-good assistant. I was always a presentable young man in the strict suits and ties we all wore. My hair had begun to go in my earliest twenties and so I looked older than I was. There was no task I wouldn’t do, tiny or large, no length to which I wouldn’t go in order to make Mr. Weltman’s life better. I’ve always longed to have me as my own assistant, because no one had a keener eye for every detail than I did. I anticipated perfectly. I discovered that I had this aptitude to sublimate everything into being supportive. Because I had so little self, I knew I couldn’t be a principal, but I also knew I sure could suss out how to make the principal’s life better, just as I’d made my mother’s life better when I was a child. Where other people might assert themselves, I served."

"Situation 3: Most business owners or managers have a core group of customers or other people whose opinions carry special weight for them. In our industry, such a person could be a restaurant critic, who, if he or she writes for a major publication, shares those opinions with perhaps a million readers. For me personally, the person could be my mother or one of my siblings—after all these years, they know how to push my buttons (and I know how to push theirs). It could also be a frequent guest who always tells me exactly how he or she feels about a meal—and is loyal enough to return no matter how the last meal turned out. So, imagine that this person with an especially weighty opinion drops in unannounced to dine, and there is only one table left in the restaurant—a table that will be served by the person you are considering hiring. Is your reaction “Great!”—or is it “Oh, no!”"

"My mother was an interesting role model. She gave us a lot of bene- fit of that precise thinking that came from accounting. My father, on the other hand, was an extremely creative, almost wild-eyed visionary, and we saw the balance of the two. If anything came of that, it was that my mother added the anchor to my father's creativity. I learned fairly young that if you didn't do the precision part, the creative part would evaporate. You had to have the foun- dation under the creativity."