Christopher Cox > Quotes

“When building something with as many moving parts as a brand-new restaurant, each small step along the way feels like a victory.”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock

“On Wilson’s orders, 14,000 U.S. troops were now in Russia waging an undeclared war in defense of “what the Russian people themselves desire,” as he had put it, fighting in league with the White Russian resistance to the Bolshevik Red Army in northwestern Russia, and in Siberia in the Far East. Wilson’s friend Irvin Cobb, editor of the late Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, warned that “Great Britain is practically bankrupt and its economic condition is desperate.”
― Christopher Cox, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

“Odysseus doesn’t overcome the lure of the siren’s song through virtue and discipline; he orders his sailors to bind him to the mast.”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock

“Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Instead: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Why Swift's dreary satire is routinely inflicted on high school English classes is a mystery to me. Tristram Shandy at least has the virtue of occasionally being funny. It's also deeply weird: postmodern 200 years before postmodernism, with a deeply unreliable narrator, typographic trickery (a death early in the book is followed by a solid-black page), and a list of character names that would make Pynchon jealous (Dr. Slop, Billy Le Fever, and a certain Hafen Slawkenbergius).

It is an important achievement in the history of the novel, a reminder that literature is an ongoing experiment—which means you should treat it like Don Quixote and read the first half before calling it a day. One can admire the pyramids without feeling the need to scale them.”
― Christopher Cox

“be a natural inclination to pay more attention to time than to outcomes, even when this behavior can hurt us. We might, for example,”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock

“tactics that businesses use to meet their deadlines or motivate their workers are a way of reapportioning that urgency: by moving up deadlines, by breaking them up into shorter chunks, by focusing the mission, by making teams interdependent. The trick is to feel that deadline effect constantly, even when the deadline itself has disappeared.”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock

“In Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the local newspaper proudly reported the fact that two hometown heroes from the 369th had been awarded the French War Cross for their gallantry under fire. The newspaper suggested that the “Germans will have to find as apt a name for the American Negro fighters as they have given to the Scots,” who were nicknamed the “Laddies from Hell.” Soon the Germans did come up with a name. The U.S. regiment would be known forever after as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” At the war’s end, France would award the entire unit the Croix de Guerre.”
― Christopher Cox, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

“tendency to seize upon the most optimistic timetable for completing a project and ignore any information that might make you revise that prediction. According”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock

“awarded the French War Cross for their gallantry under fire. The newspaper suggested that the “Germans will have to find as apt a name for the American Negro fighters as they have given to the Scots,” who were nicknamed the “Laddies from Hell.” Soon the Germans did come up with a name. The U.S. regiment would be known forever after as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” At the war’s end, France would award the entire unit the Croix de Guerre.”
― Christopher Cox, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

“calls “undue salience” to the sale, just because it’s about to end.”
― Christopher Cox, The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock