Quotes of the Day

"The best way to keep learning after you leave school is surround yourself with the smartest people you can find."

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up men to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

"Understanding how to write well and effectively communicate the nuances of your thoughts is the most important thing you will learn in school."

"I would have written a shorter letter if I'd had the time." -- Mark Twain

"Great leaders are great teachers. And great teachers are great storytellers."

"If you want to be a leader, you will teach. The two are inseparable."

"As leaders, you learn more by listening than by talking. Listening makes you mor humble, more intuitive, and smarter. Talking does none of these things."

"When you listen, you learn how things work as opposed to when you talk and state how you thing things work."

"If you must talk, ask questions."

"If we have data, let's look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." -- Jim Barksdale

"You shouldn't be able to figure out the pecking order or org chart by looking at a product."

"There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity." -- Tom Peters

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." -- Albert Einstein

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

"Team are not juries locked in a room until they reach a unanimous verdict. Don't spend hours in endless meetings striving for unanimity. Consensus is not unanimity. Guide the team to declare when 'good enough' is better."

"The perfect is the enemy of the good, from which there is no progress."

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." -- George Patton

"Where there is harmony, there is no innovation."

"Innovation comes from creativity. Creativity cannot be managed. It can be allocated, it can be budgeted, it can be measured, it can be tracked and encouraged, but it can't be dictated."

"If you're the innovator, you're like a virus. The antibodies want to kill you.
Leaders protect people from antibodies."

"A leader's job is not to prevent risk, but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. There is no such thing as a good failure and a bad failure. Or there is such a thing as a good failure and a bad failure. A good one happens quickly, and it provides plenty of lessons. Sometimes you have to look at these lessons in the data. A bad failure takes a long time and you don't learn anything. Leaders don't prevent failures. They prevent bad failures."

"Learn something new so that you can remember how hard it is to learn."

"Teach something so you can learn."

"Humility is correlated with age. Arrogance is inversely correlated with age."

"As smart leader, you surround yourself with great people. You people understand what they're doing better than you do."

"Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that come from bad judgment." -- Will Rogers

"Show me a team that never makes a mistake, and I'll show you a team that has never done anything innovative."

"Smart people can smell hypocrisy, so think before you act or speak. You have to commit to your team's goal and vision? They can tell when you don't really mean it."

"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means." -- Albert Einstein

"If you would not work for yourself, why do your people?"

All are from Rules to Success by Jonathan Rosenberg.