Quote of the Day: James Levine on Science & Tech

In the years after the dot-com boom, as workplaces swapped binders for intranets and “RTFM” became a half-joke, half-philosophy of the early digital office, a new reality set in: information was everywhere, attention was not. That cultural whiplash still feels urgent in 2026, when policies multiply faster than anyone can absorb them and “just-in-time” searching has replaced “read-first” discipline. Against that backdrop, James Levine’s dry observation lands with surgical accuracy: “Most people treat the office manual the way they treat a software manual. They never look at it”

The joke works because it’s less about laziness than about incentives. Manuals promise friction, dense pages, abstract rules, delayed payoff. Real work rewards momentum and feedback. So people do what humans reliably do: they ask the nearest colleague, skim an old Slack thread, or improvise and hope the error bar is small. When the perceived cost of reading exceeds the perceived risk of guessing, guessing wins.

Levine’s line also indicts the way organizations write. Too many manuals are compliance theater: long, generic, and half-outdated the day they’re published. They answer questions no one is asking and bury the ones everyone is. The result is a shadow system, folk practice, workaround lore, and verbal training, that moves faster than policy but quietly drifts from it. That drift isn’t harmless. It creates inconsistency and rework, and in regulated environments it becomes a real leadership failure.

James Levine, acclaimed American conductor and pianist, spent decades shaping complex institutions, most famously at the Metropolitan Opera, where precision and shared understanding aren’t optional. He knew that what’s written only matters if it’s usable in the moment of performance.

June 30 sits at the hinge of midyear, when teams audit goals, refresh processes, and quietly rewrite expectations. Treat the manual like a living score: make it short, searchable, and example-rich, and model its use until consulting it becomes humorless self-denial and more professional reflex.