Ahmed > Ahmed's Quotes

“There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.”
― Irwin Shaw

“In sustaining circumstances—when the race entails making better products that can be sold for more money to attractive customers—we found that incumbents almost always prevail. In disruptive circumstances—when the challenge is to commercialize a simpler, more convenient product that sells for less money and appeals to a new or unattractive customer set—the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator’s dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator’s solution.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability,”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“Necessity remains the mother of invention.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“innovator’s dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“Action cures fear.”
― David J. Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big

“Psychologists confirm that humans are incapable of giving their full attention to two tasks simultaneously.37 What people actually do is switch their attention from one task or platform to the next, and such task switching leads to a host of issues, including attention difficulties, poor decision making, and information overload.”
― Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

“standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“As Stephen Covey noted, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“Here are some reflections for closing out an OKR cycle: Did I accomplish all of my objectives? If so, what contributed to my success? If not, what obstacles did I encounter? If I were to rewrite a goal achieved in full, what would I change? What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“OKRs are big, not incremental—we don’t expect to hit all of them. (If we do, we’re not setting them aggressively enough.) We grade them with a color scale to measure how well we did: 0.0–0.3 is red 0.4–0.6 is yellow 0.7–1.0 is green”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Actions—and data—speak louder than words.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: Commitments are OKRs that we agree will be achieved, and we will be willing to adjust schedules and resources to ensure that they are delivered. The expected score for a committed OKR is 1.0; a score of less than 1.0 requires explanation for the miss, as it shows errors in planning and/or execution. By contrast, aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR. Aspirational OKRs have an expected average score of 0.7, with high variance.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Transparency seeds collaboration”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“But exactly how do you build engagement? A two-year Deloitte study found that no single factor has more impact than “clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely. . . . Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards—the year-end bonus check—merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs