PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
- Peter Drucker
Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet: NASA’s Apollo Program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.
- Peter Thiel
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
- Bill Gates
Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.
- Jack Dorsey
Surround yourself with people who want the best for you and the people you love!
- Zig Ziglar
From the economic slowdown after the financial crisis in 1997 through the economic boom in 2007, the motherland has been supporting Hong Kong in recovering from adversity; on the other hand, Hong Kong has been actively cooperating with the motherland in going international.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You cannot play with fire.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
- Timothy Ferriss
You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’
- Henry Ford
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”
- Ben Horowitz
Read the Bible, it is your roadmap through life.
- George Foreman
Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience.
- Oprah Winfrey
When I came into office, people said, ‘Billionaire? How do they live? What do they eat? How do they sleep?’ Today, they see me on the subway coming uptown. A couple of people say hi, some people smile and nod. Some people just sleep. It’s not an issue.
- Michael Bloomberg
On behalf of the employees of Cisco, we send our deepest sympathy and condolences to all of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, … This has been a crushing blow to the residents of the Gulf Coast and we stand by them, ready to help.
- John Chambers
Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
- Thomas Edison
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
- Timothy Ferriss
The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what’s interesting is those devices don’t do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.
- Michael Dell
I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground.
- Sam Walton
The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.
- Elon Musk
There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.
- Winston Churchill
There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt, long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.
- Winston Churchill
The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings.
- Peter Thiel
I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.
- Elon Musk
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
Twenty years and $40 billion. They seem like good round numbers.
- Michael Dell
I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
- Brian Tracy
You have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world.
- Oprah Winfrey
One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.
- Henry Ford
Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.
- Mukesh Ambani
The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
- Dale Carnegie
I worked with many departments in China to organise a ‘One million farmer’ programme. The scheme trained them to learn professional skills.
- Lee Shau Kee
The global economy has experienced considerable slowdown in recent times. However there has been one notable exception: China.
- Cheng Yu-tung
One of the roles of the Presidency is to lead a political party. Having a President in office is usually a huge advantage to a party because it gives the party a mouthpiece and an advocate at the highest level.
- John C. Maxwell
I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.
- Steve Jobs
Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
- Timothy Ferriss
“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.
- Sergey Brin
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.
- Steve Wozniak
In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.
- Wang Jianlin
Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
- Walt Disney
I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‘re-invented.’
- Jeff Bezos
Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.
- Herb Kelleher
Much to learn you still have…my old padawan… This is just the beginning!
- Yoda
I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I started a company with a bunch of buddies that got funded in my senior year, and that’s when I finished school. It was called Scour, a peer-to-peer service, file-sharing.
- Travis Kalanick
I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
- Rupert Murdoch
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.
- Andrew Carnegie
Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
- Peter Thiel
I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.
- Jack Dorsey
The world is still in deleveraging.
- Ray Dalio
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
- George Soros
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else. Be ruthless – you can always repurchase things you can’t live without.
- Timothy Ferriss
Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.
- Ben Horowitz
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
- Elon Musk
Hay que evitar siempre el ángulo agudo.
- Dale Carnegie
Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Everybody says they want to be free. Take the train off the tracks and it’s free-but it can’t go anywhere.
- Zig Ziglar
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
- Elon Musk
One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
- Dale Carnegie
Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.
- Seth Godin
People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.
- Jack Welch
He climbs highest who helps another up.
- Zig Ziglar
I think there will be PCs at every price point.
- Bill Gates
The screwball. Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.
- Joel Olsteen
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.
- Bill Gates
Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
- Paul Graham
Just saying you are better than good won’t make it so. But, when you understand what it takes to live the better than good life, and you apply yourself, your life will truly be better than good.
- Zig Ziglar
Give me a highly successful unionized industry.
- Jack Welch
As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.
- John Chambers
Unfavorable Environment Influences During Childhood.
- Napoleon Hill
A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he was born with.
- Alexander Graham Bell
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
- Rosalynn Carter
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius.
- Peter Thiel
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
- Mark Zuckerberg
1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.
- Peter Thiel
You can’t be in neutral and hope to reach your full potential.
- Joel Olsteen
The bigger your list, the greater your options. That doesn’t mean you contact everyone on your list each time you send out a press release. You pick and choose who gets what, and block out long-term strategy as you go.
- Michael Levine
She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.
- Phil Knight
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
- Wayne Gretzky
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
- Bill Gates
It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.
- Phil Knight
It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford
It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
- Seth Godin
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.
- Michael Bloomberg
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.
- Larry Page
The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it’s allowed is silos of interest.
- Seth Godin
If you can dream it, you can do it. -Walt Disney
- Walt Disney
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.
- Bill Gates
