Latest Paul Saffo Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm not sure the notion of employee or job is going to survive the transition over the next couple of decades. The very notion of a fulltime job will seem as quaint in 20 years as the notion of someone getting a gold watch at their retirement in the 1950s.

  Paul Saffo

  Retirement, Couple, Gold

  Source: bigthink.com

• This new economy that's just emerged has a new central economic actor. It's not the worker, the person who produces, nor the person who consumes, the purchaser. It's a new actor that does both things at the same time, call them a creator. They both create and consume in the same single act, and we're just beginning to see the shape of this new economy and it changes not just the economy itself, it's going to change the whole nature of the work relationship.

  Paul Saffo

  Economic, Economy

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think companies over the last 10 years have done a very bad job of explaining to their employees what the intrinsic risks are. All I know is, if you wait until you let the employee go to deal with the issue of how do you communicate to the employee about being let go, it's too late to do anything.

  Paul Saffo

  Letting Go, Thinking, Waiting

  Source: bigthink.com

• The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them.

  Paul Saffo

  People, Risk, Environment

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, "It's not a bug. It's a feature."

  Paul Saffo

  Thinking, Important, Honest

  Source: bigthink.com

• When everybody else is in a down market is focusing on what they're doing wrong, instead focus on what you should be doing differently, it may be that what you did in the past was perfectly right. It is possible to do all the right things in business and still have a business crisis because of what's happening in the external environment. And if you start focusing on mistakes only, you're going to miss opportunities.

  Paul Saffo

  Mistake, Opportunity, Past

  Source: bigthink.com

• Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.

  Paul Saffo

  Technology, Different, Transformation

  Source: bigthink.com

• My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.

  Paul Saffo

  Technology, Advice, Touching

  Source: bigthink.com

• Never mistake a clearer view for a short distance just because the technology looks like it's about to arrive in the very near future. Chances are there will be some surprises and in the long run even the most expected of futures tends to arrive late and in completely unexpected ways.

  Paul Saffo

  Running, Mistake, Distance

  Source: bigthink.com

• The most important thing that a company can do in the midst of this economic turmoil is to not lose sight of the long-term perspective. Don't confuse the short-term crises with the long-term trends. Amidst all of these short-term change are some fundamental structural transformations happening in the economy, and the best way to stay in business is to not allow the short-term distractions to cause you to ignore what is happening in the long term.

  Paul Saffo

  Long, Perspective, Important

  Source: bigthink.com

• We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

  Paul Saffo

  Technology, Community, Culture

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive?

  Paul Saffo

  Home, Ideas, People

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.

  Paul Saffo

  Two, Decades, Fundamentalism

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• There is reason to be scared. Look at what has happened with fundamentalism - this is a reaction against modernity. It happens to be cloaked in religion, but these are people saying enough is enough. It's happened again and again through history. The good news is that modernism has always won.

  Paul Saffo

  People, Looks, News

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter's definition of privacy which is, "Privacy is the right to be left alone."

  Paul Saffo

  Fall, Thinking, Justice

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.

  Paul Saffo

  Technology, Digital, Glue

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• I think it is just a matter of time before we have literal ghosts in the machine so you can create an alter ego of yourself that learns from your social experiences and extends a life even if you're no longer in the game or you are no longer alive.

  Paul Saffo

  Thinking, Games, Ego

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• I would say digital technology probably doesn't have much impact on us so far. We've seen photographs of people from when they are alive. We see home movies. We have videotapes now and e-mails. When it's going to get interesting is in massively multiplayer online games where you have avatars (online personas). You could actually create an avatar that's semi-autonomous. It could do things for you while you get off the game to run the rest of your life.

  Paul Saffo

  Running, Home, Technology

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.

  Paul Saffo

  Cyberspace, Want, Lost

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion.

  Paul Saffo

  Years, Class, Ideas

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• As Stewart Brand (co-founder of Emeryville's Global Business Network) likes to say, "Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first." There are examples everywhere. The tapes from the original Viking landers that went to Mars are at (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but there is no machine that can read the tapes.

  Paul Saffo

  Years, Forever, Machines

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• I worry about a society that can remember everything.

  Paul Saffo

  Remembers Everything, Worry, Remember

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.

  Paul Saffo

  Thinking, Ebay, Cyberspace

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• Every day huge amounts of information break off like icebergs and melt away. What worries me is that much information in electronic form is never reduced to paper. Some people have described this as being on the edge of a digital Dark Age and fear we may commit a massive act of amnesia.

  Paul Saffo

  Dark, Break Off, Worry

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• If you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers.

  Paul Saffo

  Kids, Technology, Years

  Source: www.sfgate.com