25-Minute Meeting

You can write 25-Minute Meeting on the back of a bus ticket. But do not mistake small writing for small meaning.

Strip away the number and the idea is this: life punishes vagueness. A figure forces you to say exactly how much, exactly when, exactly who. Once you have said it, the work is half done, because the argument is now with reality and not with your mood.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

The best school principal is visible at the gate in the morning and invisible during the teachers' period. Presence at the right hour, absence at the right hour — that is the whole craft.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.