Michael Goitein > Michael Goitein's Quotes

“What’s the first thing we need to do here?” “What options do we have?” and “How might we get to a point where we can make an informed decision?”
― Elena Astilleros, Invisible Leader: Facilitation secrets for catalyzing change, cultivating, innovation, and commanding results

“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer, and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate, and your company will degenerate into a bad place to work. While it is quite possible to design a great communication architecture without one-on-one meetings, in most cases one-on-ones provide an excellent mechanism for information and ideas to flow up the organization and should be part of your design.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”
― Reid Hoffman

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“Although Levels 1 through 6 are available to us in virtually all of our joint choice-making situations, unfortunately we take on either Level 1 or Level 6 responsibility in the vast majority of cases.”
― Roger L. Martin, The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-and The Rest Of Us-can Harness The Power Of True Partnership

“Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
― Michael Porter, What Is Strategy?

“If you can define the problem differently than everybody else in the industry, you can generate alternatives that others aren’t thinking about.”
― Roger L. Martin, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking

“Shareholders have a residual claim on a firm’s assets and earnings, meaning they get what’s left after all other claimants—employees and their pension funds, suppliers, tax-collecting governments, debt holders, and preferred shareholders (if any exist)—are paid. The value of their shares, therefore, is the discounted value of all future cash flows minus those payments. Since the future is unknowable, potential shareholders must estimate what that cash flow will be; their collective expectations about the future determine the stock price. Any shareholders who expect that the discounted value of future equity earnings of the company will be less than the current price will sell their stock. Any potential shareholders who expect that the discounted future value will exceed the current price will buy stock. This means that shareholder value has almost nothing to do with the present. Indeed, present earnings tend to be a small fraction of the value of common shares. Over the past decade, the average yearly price-earnings multiple for the S&P 500 has been 22x, meaning that current earnings represent less than 5 percent of stock prices.”
― Roger L. Martin, A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness

“It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”
― Albert Einstein

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
― Albert Einstein

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
― Albert Einstein

“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
― Albert Einstein

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...”
― Albert Einstein

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
― Albert Einstein

“Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
― Albert Einstein

“I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.”
― Albert Einstein

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“famous Brazilian singer Anitta in her living room to discuss her upcoming Netflix documentary Vai Anitta. For the two hundred million people in Brazil, Anitta is like Madonna and Beyoncé combined,”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”
― Joan Didion

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
― Steve Jobs