Festina lente: A Roman emperor's guide to getting stuff done

Often the most powerful thing you can do to help your organization is to buy time rather than apply quick technical fixes that may have worked in the past.

Instead of fast and furious, intentional imperfection is slow and steady. It sacrifices the thrill of short-term rewards for the serenity of sustainable success.

One shift that can help us all is to change our minds about planning. Like search, planning is a literacy that’s not taught in school, and yet it’s a key to success in life and work. We plan events, trips, families, sites, systems, companies, and cities. We do it all the time but make the same mistakes. First, we procrastinate. We fear complexity,

What he was really doing was giving up the republic, but so gradually and with such tact—while displaying at every stage such self-evident benefits—that the Romans would adapt to and even embrace their new environment, hardly noticing how much it had changed. They themselves would become crops, vines, cattle, and bees. For unlike Xerxes, Pericles,