Tracy Goss > Quotes

“Accepting that you can’t control the outcome is not the end of action—it is the opening for the boldest and most daring action. You can accept total responsibility for your choices and actions. You are free to play full-out in creating and implementing an extraordinary future for yourself and your organization.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word On Power

“When you accept that life does not turn out the way it “should,” you are free to take actions that are not constrained by the need to control life so it turns out the way that it “should” (or, at the very least, to make sure life doesn’t turn out the way it “shouldn’t”).”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word On Power

“The American leaders could only bring this new realm of possibility into existence by making a declaration—a form of conversation. Once human rights were declared, actions that would never have been conceived before came naturally to mind.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word On Power

“The way you are being is the source of your reality, which in turn is the source of your actions.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Once you acquire the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, it cannot be taken away from you. In fact, it increases over time. That is why executives and leaders must re-invent themselves before they can re-invent an organization, institution, or country effectively. Without the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, how can they possibly succeed?”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word On Power

“When you commit to this impossible future, you are “taking a stand.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Finally, you get to explain the way you are, and justify staying that way. This payoff, the strongest of the three, is directly connected to the “in order to” column of your Winning Strategy. Indeed, a racket can be thought of as the “dark side” of your Winning Strategy, the side that you would rather dismiss from sight, because you don’t want to acknowledge its hold on you. The film producer who never works up to her potential is running a racket. She can always say to herself, “I could have done more to make that work”—which becomes a handy justification for things staying the way they are. An executive named Jack identified his racket accurately when he said, “I keep telling my people what I want them to do, but in the deep recesses of my mind, I wonder, with a good deal of concern, what would happen if they really did all the things I requested. In my gut, I can’t help but feel I would no longer be necessary. Of course, that’s very human of me and not something that readily comes into my mind, but whether I am aware of it or not, it lives very viscerally for me. Do I really want to be dispensable? I tell myself and everyone else, I want to be dispensable—I harp on it all the time—and yet I have the ugly confrontation with the truth inside my thoughts. The recurring fear is: If I become dispensable, I’ll have to find something else to do.” Jack’s Winning Strategy was listening for “What is the largest possibility?” so as to act by “challenging and arguing,” in order to “be the best and avoid being ordinary.” When he looked at the unwanted condition of being indispensable, saw it as a racket, and asked, “What is the payoff?” he replied, “The payoff is to justify staying the way I am—that is, being indispensable. If I were dispensable, I would be like anyone else—ordinary. And in my Winning Strategy, being ordinary is something that I’m constitutionally unwilling to tolerate.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Impossible Anything that is outside of your reality—anything that occurs as something that is not possible for you to accomplish, or not possible for you to accomplish at this time and/or under these circumstances.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Some of your “missing and essential” components can be accomplished through continuous improvement. Others will require transformations. All of them will have to be organized and coordinated.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Declaration An act of speaking that brings forth a future the moment it is spoken.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“An organization operating with a new master paradigm, the Re-Invention Paradigm, by contrast, develops an organizational context that operates from practices designed to “invent and commit,” the practices necessary to operate in a mode of transformation: declaring the future rather than predicting it; taking a stand rather than generating consensus; making bold promises that you don’t know how to keep; creating contexts; fulfilling new realms of possibility; and recruiting and developing catalysts for transformation rather than change agents.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“A paradigm is a constellation of concepts and values shared by a community of people.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“What is the impossibility that I am compensating for right now with my Winning Strategy?”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“It means committing yourself to continuously act consistent with the possibility you declared, from the moment the declaration is spoken, regardless of the circumstances.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“You are shifting from … … “what’s possible” occurring as “what’s predictable,” bound by the limits of past experience … … to … … “what’s possible” occurring as what you say is possible and what you commit to make happen, based on nothing.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Philip Amato, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Wesley Emerson, Werner Erhard, Fernando Flores, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Goldstein, Martin Heidegger, Joan Holmes, Randy MacNamara, Jim Selman, William Shakespeare, and Constantine Stanislavsky.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“In other words, the Re-Invention Master Paradigm is not anchored in “cause” and “effect.” The Universal Human Paradigm enmeshes you in a continual effort to find the “cause” of everything that went “wrong” (or “right”), but the Re-Invention Master Paradigm is anchored only in “effect.” There is only “what happened.” There is only one event, then another, then another—with no discernible cause-effect relationship between them. The nature of their “causes” (the influence of one event on another, or the way in which one “effect” may have led to another “effect”) is a matter of your interpretation. All “cause” is interpretation, and irrelevant to moving the action forward.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“What are you not beating down doors to do? What are you not actively taking on but would if you could?”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Until you have re-invented yourself to be personally free from the constraints and limitations of your own past (including your own past success), you will not have the power to deal effectively with what is at the source of resistance to change”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Life does not turn out the way it “should.” Nor does life turn out the way it “shouldn’t.” Life turns out the way it does.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Clearing A Heideggerian term that in German (Lichtung) means a clearing in the forest, a light, an opening. The clearing you are determines what is possible in the “opening” you are for others as a leader. The transformations of Executive Re-Invention are designed to produce a shift in your clearing as a leader: from being a clearing for fixing and improving what’s wrong and shouldn’t be as a compensation for what’s not possible, to a clearing for making the impossible happen.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“In this situation, at this moment, what’s not possible for me?”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Every human being has his or her own Winning Strategy—a Strategy for winning the games of life, for “making it” in life—or even for surviving in life.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Survival A condition that exists whenever you fear that you could lose something, the loss of which is threatening to your life. It could be a threat to your physical life, but commonly it’s a threat to your professional life, or even more likely, a threat to any important aspect (family, finances, children) of your life. When we say survival, most of us think about the low end of survival, which is a last gasp for breath. The high end of survival is success. Some leaders succeed by never taking risks, while others succeed by taking risks all the time. Depending on what is popular in the leadership arena, or what the concerns of a particular organization or industry happen to be, either risk-takers or those who won’t take risks will be in demand. In either case, risk-taking or risk-avoiding, the drive is to survive—code name: “succeed.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“It’s not that human beings are resisting. Its that they do not have the capacity to start from a clean sheet of paper.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Replace “predicting the future” (by analyzing what’s possible, benchmarking, setting objectives or goals, or making feasible promises) with “declaring the future” and making bold promises to fulfill it.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Committed Speaking and Listening A series of speech acts that move what’s not possible or impossible to a possibility, and a possibility to a reality.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Language is the only leverage for changing the context of the world around you. This is because people apprehend and construct reality through the way they speak and listen.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“TRANSFORMATION is a function of altering the way you are being—to create something that is currently not possible in your reality.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

“Being As it pertains to transformation, the realm of possibility in which something exists, rather than an emotional or behavioral state. The way you are being at any given time determines what’s possible.”
― Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen