AA > AA's Quotes

“Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow:   Communication   Common knowledge   Decision making”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship

“We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution we’ve referred to above. Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important”
― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

“There are three things you need to be considered a truly great company, Collins continues, switching gears to Apple. Number one, you have to deliver superior financial results. Number two, you have to make a distinctive impact, to the point where if you didn't exist you couldn't be easily replaced. Number three, the company must have lasting endurance, beyond multiple generations of technology, markets, and cycles, and it must demonstrate the ability to do this beyond a single leader. Apple has numbers one and two. Steve was racing the clock [to help it get number three]. Whether it has lasting endurance is the final check, something we won't know for some time. There are lots of good people there, and maybe they'll get it.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“He was a man too busy to flush toilets.”
― Mona Simpson, A Regular Guy

“One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason.” (p.98)”
― Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus: Stop Marketing AT People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by Helping Your Customers Do the Marketing thing for You.

“The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.”
― Steve Jobs

“I don't know anyone who wouldn't say it's the most fulfilling experience in their lives. People love it. Which is different from saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes. - Steve Jobs”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous—“These charts are bullshit!” or “This deal is crap!”—and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it—poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“Good Design is:   1.  innovative   2.  what makes a product useful   3.  aesthetic   4.  what makes a product understandable   5.  unobtrusive   6.  honest   7.  long-lasting   8.  thorough down to the last detail   9.  environmentally friendly 10.  as little design as possible”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader

“He directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets, including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“The sheer simplicity of the quadrant strategy had laid the foundation for an organization that would say no again and again—until it said yes, at which point it would attack the new project with fierce determination.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“There’s nothing sophisticated about the process of getting the right people in the right jobs. It’s a matter of being systematic and consistent in interviewing and appraising people and developing them through useful feedback.”
― BusinessNews Publishing, Summary: Execution: Review and Analysis of Bossidy and Charan's Book

“Stronger, faster companies can detect and pounce on opportunities, for instance, to take advantage of the downturn by snapping up assets at bargain prices and snatching market share out from under their competitors.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable. This objective comes before revenues, before profits, before press, even before customer satisfaction. All these other factors can be fixed later - but only if the channel is established.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“customers often bend over backward to give market share leaders second and third chances, bringing cries of anguish from their competitors who would never be granted such grace.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“the company may be saying “state-of-the-art” when the pragmatist wants to hear “industry standard.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Entering the mainstream market is an act of burglary, of breaking and entering, of deception, often even of stealth.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“you get installed by the pragmatists as the leader, and from then on, they conspire to help keep you there.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Most car dealers make the majority of their profits from servicing cars. They treat vehicles like a subscription service, expecting people to visit their service centers multiple times a year for many years. This is the main reason dealerships have fought to block Tesla from selling its cars directly to consumers.fn15”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else.”
― James Altucher, Choose Yourself