Leon Gettler

A word of praise today for one of my facebook friends, Leon Gettler.

Gettler, BTW, is a freelance writer who lines in Melbourne, Australia.  Gettler's facebook profile includes the following quotation from Winston Churchill:

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public."

I've forgotten why I initially linked with Gettler, but we are both facebook friends with Sam Antar, and that is a story in itself.  (For another day.)

Anyway, I'm writing this because of one bit of Gettlerian phrase-making that I particularly admired,.  He wrote recently on FB of a conversation he had had with a management consultant who sells "benchmarking and best practice."  But ... this was Gettler's point ... you don't help anyone achieve excellence that way.  Steve Jobs didn't become Steve Jobs by learning to imitate Steve Jobs. 

All you are doing, Gettler reports himself saying, is "creating karaoke corporations."

Karaoke corporations.  I love it.