Zach Arend

“You dramatically increase your value to others if you always maintain a calm and pleasant manner.”
― Daniel Lapin, Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money

“as Jack Welch approximated the point more pungently in his 2005 book Winning, “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”)”
― Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

“Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. Our modus operandi is to break the things we’re managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs . . . [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience. A drive for efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.”
― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win