A Quote by Russell L. Ackoff

Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.

Russell L. Ackoff

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Because Commission Critical Decline Did Errors Fail Frequently Generally Lost More Omission Opportunities Organizations Than

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Russell L. Ackoff
February 12, 1919 - October 29, 2009

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.

Malcolm Gladwell

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.

John of Salisbury

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Thomas Huxley

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That the more authoritarian organizations survive and prevail goes generally unnoticed because people focus on the objectives of organizations, which are many and varied, rather than on their structures, which lend to be similar.

Robert Shea

Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they're ratified into law.

E. A. Bucchianeri

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

John Stuart Mill

Doing a background check is still a very manual process, because the government agencies that create the records are largely paper-based systems. I'm not going to deny that there are errors, because in any system that involves human beings or technology, there are going to be errors.

James Lee

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Richard Russo

The Constitution contains no 'dignity' Clause, and even if it did, the government would be incapable of bestowing dignity. ... Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits.

Clarence Thomas

Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.

Chuck Palahniuk

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.

Jacob Bronowski

The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.

Francis Bacon

At equal returns, public investments are generally superior to private investments not only because they are more liquid but also because amidst distress, public markets are more likely than private ones to offer attractive opportunities to average down.