Latest Quotes

“Personalizing successes sets people up for disastrous failure. They begin to treat the successes totally as a personal reflection of their abilities rather than the result of capitalizing on a good opportunity, being at the right place at the right time, or even being just plain lucky.”

— Jim Paul, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

“Blackwater's dedication to efficiency formed the cornerstone of our entire corporate culture. It was perhaps the ultimate benefit of our streamlined hierarchy: The company had one owner— me— so no stockholders to answer to. There was no board of directors to argue with, and no interminable bureaucra…”

— Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater

“I know that men are likely to bring what are only their prejudices to the judgment of alien peoples. Avoiding that is one of the main purposes of education. But trying to prevent it by removing the authority of men's reason is to render ineffective the instrument that can correct their prejudices. T…”

— Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind

“After all, parents can shop around for a psychologist just as some Catholics used to shop for a confessor.”

— Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind

“Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to 'top-grade' their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling o…”

— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world. In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain — an amplification…”

— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work…”

— Jeff Bezos, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into…”

— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

“In a company with over 270,000 employees , there are only 23 at corporate headquarters in Omaha. There are no regular budget meetings for Berkshire companies. The CEOs who run Berkshire's subsidiary companies simply never hear from Buffett unless they call for advice or seek capital for their busine…”

— William N. Thorndike , The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

“In a company with over 270,000 employees, there are only 23 at corporate headquarters in Omaha. There are no regular budget meetings for Berkshire companies. The CEOs who run Berkshire's subsidiary companies simply never hear from Buffett unless they call for advice or seek capital for their busines…”

— , amazon.com

“You have to be willing to always ask what the return is and to go forward only with projects that offer attractive returns using conservative assumptions.”

— William N. Thorndike , The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

“Buffett has famously eschewed splitting Berkshire's A shares, which currently trade at over $120,000, more than fifty times the price of the next-highest issue on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He believes these splits are purely cosmetic and likens the process to dividing a pizza into eight ve…”

— William N. Thorndike , The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

“On the morning of my forty-second birthday, I got a call from my mother. 'Happy birthday,' she said. 'Remember, your dad was forty-two when he had his first attack.' The men in my family don't tend to grow old. I think about that sometimes, when I see my teenage kids dig through the refrigerator in…”

— Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater

“I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team's vision.”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“The Big Three automakers loved that my father backed his research and development with his own funds; if prototypes failed, he took on all the losses. The approach made him relentless and tactical; every mistake the company made was documented and chronicled in a notebook he stored in his office des…”

— Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater

“Kobe, who had been named the NBA's most valuable player that year, was particularly laser focused. I've always been impressed by Kobe's resilience and ironclad self-confidence. Unlike Shaq, who was often plagued by self-doubt, Kobe never let such thoughts cross his mind. If someone set the bar at te…”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“The essence of coaching is to get the players to wholeheartedly agree to being coached, then offer them a sense of their destiny as a team.”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“This forced me to start thinking of the game as a strategic problem rather than a tactical one. As a young player, you tend to focus most of your attention on how you're going beat your man in any given game. But now I began to see basketball as a dynamic game of chess in which all the pieces were i…”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“I bought a bicycle and pedaled all over town, trying to connect with the real New York City. But no matter how much time I spent in Central Park, to me living in the city felt like living indoors. I needed to be someplace where I could feel a strong connection to the earth.”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“What I liked about basketball was how interconnected everything was. The game was a complex dance of moves and countermoves that made it much more alive than other sports I played. In addition, basketball demanded a high level of synergy. To succeed, you needed to rely upon everybody else on the flo…”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success