Quote: I choose a lazy person to do a hard job (Attributed to Bill Gates) (Congressional Record Help Request)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Thanks, Dan and Dave. Your help is deeply appreciated. Carl von
Clausewitz is also the lucky recipient of an ascription together with
Helmuth von Moltke, Erich von Manstein and others. The attribution to
"von Somebody" is popular.

The people who are citing this breakdown into four classes clearly
want to be placed in the brilliant but lazy quadrant. To prove their
laziness they give sloppy and/or misleading quotations and
attributions. The diligent but block-headed quadrant which is labeled
dangerous is my homebase though I slip into the lazy sector
periodically.

The leading candidate currently is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. There
are a cluster of citations for Hammerstein in 1933, and I was able to
access scans for the following:

Journal: Review of Military Literature: The Command and General Staff
School Quarterly
Volume: 13
Number 50
Quote Page: 23 and 24
Published Quarterly by The Command and General Staff School Library,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

(Verified with scans from Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library)

The bracketed statement within the excerpt is part of the quoted
passage. It is not an editorial comment from me. The excerpt was taken
from a periodical based in Great Britain called "Army, Navy & Air
Force Gazette".

[Begin excerpt]

SELECTION OF GERMAN OFFICERS

[Extracted from: "Army, Navy & Air Force Gazette," 18 January 1933]

General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the
German Army, has a method of selecting officers which strikes us as
being highly original and peculiarly un­Prussian. According to
Exchange, a Berlin newspaper has printed the following as his answer
to a query as to how he judged his officers: "I divide my officers
into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy,
and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff.
Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid
and lazy.  The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest
leadership posts.  He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity
for difficult decisions.  But whoever is stupid and industrious must
be got rid of, for he is too dangerous."

[End excerpt]

Garson


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 2:35 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Quote: I choose a lazy person to do a hard job (Attributed to
>               Bill Gates) (Congressional Record Help Request)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Garson
>
> I have not traced the quote yet, but I note that several sources attribute
> it to Erich von Manstein, and not von Moltke.
>
> DanG
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM, ADSGarson O'Toole <
> adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Quote: I choose a lazy person to do a hard job
>> (Attributed to
>>               Bill Gates) (Congressional Record Help Request)
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Thank you very much for sharing a valuable lead, Dave. While exploring
>> the version of the quote attributed to Walter Chrysler I did come
>> across a 2011 book called "The Lazy Winner" that included a discussion
>> of General von Moltke and his four types of officers on the same page
>> as the saying attributed to Chrysler.
>>
>> When I searched for the Moltke quotation about the value of lazy
>> officers I was not able to find it before a 2003 book called "The Lazy
>> Way to Success" by Fred Gratzon. Have you found any cites before 2003?
>>
>> It is possible that the Moltke's translators expressed his ideas using
>> different phrases or different vocabulary, and I have not determined
>> the proper search expressions. It is also possible that Gratzon or
>> someone else moved Moltke's discussion of officers from the German
>> language to English relatively recently.
>>
>> There are a few quotations credited to Moltke in quotation references,
>> but none matches the quote about four types of officers, lazy
>> officers, or a value matrix.
>>
>> JL: Have you read anything by Moltke in your research? Based on your
>> comment you do not recognize this notion of four types of officers.
>>
>> Garson

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