After 14 years, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.
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Quotes tagged ‘strategy’
Influence is persuasion in slow motion.
TV inventor John Logie Baird hates dealing with his board of directors. The chairman was particularly fat. So he designed his lab with a deliberately narrow entrance. He had to be shoved through. He was so humiliated, he never returned.
Nemo me impune lacessit. (No one attacks me with impurity.)
Literacy is the ability to read the word. Leadership is the ability to read the world.
Where caution has been happily united to audacity and both have been joined to spread common sense.
According to Herodotuc, Darius sent a royal messenger to Oroites court to deliver a series of proclamation with respect verging on awe, he date to have read aloud one of two final messages: 'Persians, King Darius forbids you to serve as guards to Oroites.' Upon hearing this the guards immediately st…
Ike was interested in how Zhukov smashed through German minefields with so little loss of armor. It wasn't complicated, Zhukov replied. He sent the infantry through first. 'The losses we get from personal mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if t…
Jackson refused to attend the 5th annual MTV awards unless they agree to call him the King of Pop. It stuck.
When Pat joined the army, it made me tougher. Had he not joined the Army of course he'd still be alive; but it also made me able to deal with his death.
The procedure, gentlemen. The procedure we need not hesitate about dimensions.
They cursed Jay Gould the way you curse someone who massacres after victory.
Evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi. (Having avoid Charybdis, I've fallen into Scylla.)
Tipping your hand is one of the dumbest mistakes you can make in a military confrontation.
The way to win a game like that involves maintaining and increasing the tension. The person who makes the first break, who releases the tension, it's going to go against them, partly because they've broken the tension and now the other guy has the first move to exploit the new play dynamic.
If I have a slightly better position, and I'm improving my position, then all the tactics are hovering like potential energy.
When strongly disagreeing with another, most of us have a tendency to see things solely through our own world view.… In these circumstances, it can be constructive to take a minute to understand why the other person has reached the conclusion that they have. For instance, what in their background ha…
There is no substitute for working alongside someone in the trenches.
The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were…