[Paul Ford] as an advisor…people come to me and ask[:] How do I reconstruct the world so that it appreciates me?

[Rich Ziade] Your money’s not in a safe deposit box at the bank.

[Paul Ford] No, it’s in a database.

[Rich Ziade] It’s a row in a database, right?

[Paul Ford] Yes, so much of our lives are rows in databases. It actually probably should scare us all day long…Because have you ever seen what engineers do? Have you ever met a [data base engineer]? Yeah, it’s not good.

Paul Ford:

[By design] the architecture of the giant organization is built to insulate itself against an enormous amount of failure.

And it’s built to create irrelevance in human beings.

Paul Ford on leadership:

I used to feel that to demonstrate leadership I had to know everything. I had to show that I knew everything top to bottom.

[what is actually the case is] you don’t know everything. You’re just the guy in charge. So drive forward and let everybody tell you what you’re missing.

Also, Paul on the traditional enmity between disciplines like engineering and marketing:

The most brutal fact of life is that the discipline you love and care for is utterly irrelevant without the other disciplines that you tend to despise.