Damon Runyon

The race doesn’t always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong. But that’s the way to bet.

Colin Powell

People ask me, Where did your leadership training come from? I am sometimes reluctant to admit that everything I did in 35 years in the service I learned as a brand new second lieutenant.

I was taught to think about mission and people.

Mission. What are you trying to accomplish? Don’t do anything until you know what the mission is. Drilled into our hearts and into our … [ Read more ]

Colin Powell

The challenge for me was to have informal contacts and to get information from outside the organization that had been set up to provide me information. I did that beginning at 6:30 every morning, when I’d hit my office having read all the newspapers. I would get the CIA to come in for 20 minutes with no other staff members present and tell me what … [ Read more ]

Colin Powell

I’m not a great fan of reorganization. Reorganizations tend to be something you do to people, not for people. Most reorganizations that I’ve seen really were for the purpose of getting around people, solving problems that should have been addressed directly by getting rid of them. You give me the right people, and I don’t much care what organization you give me. Good things will … [ Read more ]

John J. Clancy

If you look at the psychology of loyalty—which I did—you see that it’s instinctive. It’s a survival technique that dates back to our pre-human ancestors. It’s a profound psychological need. You can’t dispense with it. At one point, we projected loyalty onto organizations. Now, we’re projecting it onto other people.

There can be other loyalties, too. Software developers are loyal to their product. They are willing … [ Read more ]

Randy Komisar

I question whether the loss of loyalty, as most people define it, is really a problem. Loyalty comes with its own set of problems because it suggests that people have a sense of reliance, which can become a crutch that props up the status quo. Loyal people may not be watchful enough and may not adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances.

Peter Drucker

One should not minimize risks any place, for it minimizes opportunities. Minimizing risk is a self-defeating strategy and not a particularly intelligent one… One doesn’t begin with risks. You list the opportunities and then you compare the risk against them. The opportunity-risk ratio determines your strategy, not the risks.

There are risks that you can afford to take because the opportunities are so great. There are … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

One looks at a country’s history and traditions and culture and not just the economic statistics because countries do not change their fundamental behavior, or at least not fast.

Peter Drucker

[Economics and technology] are the wrong places to begin. The fundamental changes are social, and they are the greatest changes imaginable.

Peter Drucker

We are at the end of economic theory as we know it for three reasons. One is that information and knowledge don’t fall under the law of scarcity and under the law of diminishing returns. That’s a very important reason. When I sell you my book, you have it, and I don’t have it anymore. When I give you information, I still have it. In … [ Read more ]

Quincy Jones

The basic thing you need for a long and varied career is to have a core love or interest that you can really develop so that you have confidence and really know what you’re doing. You need to learn one thing well before you start branching out. Everything else relates to the approach you take with your basic core skill.

Quincy Jones, Oprah Winfrey

The thing that Oprah Winfrey talks about all the time is that we do things either with love or fear. If you’re afraid, you can really mess up. If you just love what you’re doing, whatever happens you’re moving ahead.

Quincy Jones

To be successful, you have to put your time in and be centered and humbled enough to observe other people. Stravinsky used to say observation is the key responsibility for creative people. He thought it was important to watch the forces of nature… I think all the answers to our questions are out there in the universe if we just can slow down enough to … [ Read more ]

Daniel Yankelovich

Measuring the wrong things always happens in times of great change.

Daniel Yankelovich

The Long Boom assumes that the market will somehow automatically take care of those who lose out because of advances in technology. And, as Peter [Schwartz] acknowledges, there will be losers. While those with relevant skills benefit enormously, the punishment for a lack of skills is brutal. Willy-nilly, technology creates winners and losers in a vivid and remarkable way. Yet I see no sign that … [ Read more ]

Warren McFarlan

So how do you know when to make the first move? I would say, when four conditions are present simultaneously. No. 1, when your bet requires a big investment, in terms of both dollars and time to market. No. 2, when it will provide customers with new and substantial value. No. 3, when the cost for customers to switch away from you will be high. … [ Read more ]

Annette Simmons

People really don’t want more business information. They are up to their eyeballs in it. They want faith—faith in you, your goals, your success, the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not facts. Faith needs a story to sustain it—a meaningful story.

David Whyte

Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that aren’t our own become another blur, too.

David Whyte

When we work only to do, we most often find ourselves helplessly doing again without having placed the first doing in any context, without having celebrated any accomplishment… Most people who exhibit mastery in a work or a subject often have left it completely for a long period, only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

The pioneer is convinced that it knows what market a new thing is designed for. But this rarely is the market that subsequently picks up the product.