John > John's Quotes

“The two-year note has become the Treasury market’s gauge of expectations regarding when and how quickly the Fed will raise rates.”
― Anonymous

“If one were to choose a single word to characterize that identity, it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. A bumper sticker, a sardonic motto, and a charge dating from the Age of Woodstock have recast the Jeffersonian trinity in modern vernacular: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins”; “Shop till you drop”; “If it feels good, do it.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, astute observer of the young Republic, noted the “feverish ardor” of its citizens to accumulate. Yet, even as the typical American “clutches at everything,” the Frenchman wrote, “he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” However munificent his possessions, the American hungered for more, an obsession that filled him with “anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation.”2”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Writing over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point. “Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people,” he wrote, made American democracy possible.4 A half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a similar symbiosis between affluence and liberty. “A politics of abundance,” he claimed, had created the American way of life, “a politics which smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.”5 William Appleman Williams, another historian, found an even tighter correlation. For Americans, he observed, “abundance was freedom and freedom was abundance.”6”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“In the 1960s, however, the empire of production began to come undone. Within another twenty years—thanks to permanently negative trade balances, a crushing defeat in Vietnam, oil shocks, “stagflation,” and the shredding of a moral consensus that could not withstand the successive assaults of Elvis Presley, “the pill,” and the counterculture, along with news reports that God had died—it had become defunct. In its place, according to Maier, there emerged a new “Empire of Consumption.” Just as the lunch-bucket-toting factory worker had symbolized the empire of production during its heyday, the teenager, daddy’s credit card in her blue jeans and headed to the mall, now emerged as the empire of consumption’s emblematic figure. The evil genius of the empire of production was Henry Ford. In the empire of consumption, Ford’s counterpart was Walt Disney.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Carter then proceeded to kill any chance he had of securing reelection. In American political discourse, fundamental threats are by definition external. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or international communism could threaten the United States. That very year, Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries had emerged to pose another such threat. That the actions of everyday Americans might pose a comparable threat amounted to rank heresy. Yet Carter now dared to suggest that the real danger to American democracy lay within.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“My mother and my father both, you know, the term would be, ‘suck it up and just get on with it’; ‘don’t let bad things that happen to you stop you’; ‘you’re in control of your life,’” recalls Bloomberg. That advice is one of his sharpest childhood memories.”
― Joyce Purnick, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics

“Innovative Market Systems was no overnight success. Bloomberg began by investing about $300,000 and went to work with three recruits he had met at Salomon—Thomas Secunda, who specialized in analytics; Chuck Zegar, who created the software; and Duncan MacMillan, the expert in customer needs. All three are still at Bloomberg L.P., wealthy but unsung heroes of the Bloomberg saga.”
― Joyce Purnick, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics

“Innovation could not thrive without corporate support and effective commercial strategies.”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“Balsillie followed two Sun Tzu tactics religiously: appear strong no matter how weak your hand; and move to uneven terrain if an aggressor is overwhelming. For Balsillie, rugged ground meant keeping competitors, suppliers, and customers off balance.”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“Another contender was Nokia’s 9000 Communicator, a book-sized tool that looked like a cellphone strapped onto a mini keyboard. A precursor to the smartphone, the 9000 combined computing, cellular, and Internet applications such as browsing and e-mail. The Finnish phone was so glamorous it was used by Val Kilmer’s Simon Templar character in the 1997 remake of The Saint. Few consumers, however, could afford the $800 price tag, and wireless cellular network carriers more accustomed to handling voice traffic charged a fortune to relay”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“RIM’s chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove’s mantra, “Only the paranoid survive.”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“I had an expression: Never moon the gorilla,” Balsillie says. “Microsoft was the gorilla. We cut them by far the widest berth of anyone.” Balsillie’s strategy for dealing with Microsoft was to undersell RIM’s potential. Upon launching BlackBerry, he pitched the device to Microsoft as a pager-like service to promote the software giant’s corporate e-mail software, Exchange.”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“Bill Kelley, a Bloomberg employee, waited minutes before replying on his BlackBerry to a relative asking: “Bill, are you OK?” At 9:23 a.m. Kelley sent the last message of his life from the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. “So far … we’re trapped on the 106th floor, but apparently [the] fire department is almost here.”5 These messages are a sample of a vast collection of e-mails sent on September 11, 2001, and later shared with news media or stored in a 9/11 digital archive owned by the Library of Congress. Many of the e-mails were dispatched by BlackBerrys. For trapped or fleeing workers, BlackBerrys were the only reliable communication link in lower Manhattan. After the first plane knocked out cell towers on top of the World Trade Center, cell and landline circuits were overwhelmed. Paging companies lost many of their frequencies, and phone lines went dead for hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers6 when a call-switching center, several cell towers, and fiber-optic links were smashed by debris from a collapsed building.7”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“Smartphone makers sought deeper ties with retail buyers by adding ring tones, games, Web browsers, and other applications to their phones. Carriers, however, wanted this business to themselves. If they couldn’t sell applications within their “walled gardens,” carriers worried they would be reduced to mere utilities or “dumb pipes” carrying data and voice traffic. Nokia learned the hard way just how ferociously carriers could defend their turf. In the late 1990s the Finnish phone maker launched Club Nokia, a Web-based portal that allowed customers to buy and download”
― Jacquie McNish, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

“Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?”
― Steve Kaplan, The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny

“The Comedy Equation: An ordinary guy or gal struggling against insurmountable odds without many of the required skills and tools with which to win yet never giving up hope.”
― Steve Kaplan, The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny

“John Cleese once said that when they started Monty Python, they thought that comedy was the silly bits: “We used to think that comedy was watching someone do something silly . . . we came to realize that comedy was watching somebody watch somebody do something silly.” That’s the basis of the tool of Straight Line/Wavy Line.”
― Steve Kaplan, The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny

“In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“What is important is the thinking you force yourself to go through to understand the relationship between the various aspects of your production process.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Take another example. An Intel development engineer who has uniquely detailed knowledge of a particular manufacturing process effectively controls how it is used. Since the process will eventually provide the foundation for the work of many product designers all over the company, the leverage the development engineer exerts is enormous. The same is true for a geologist in an oil company or an actuary in an insurance firm. All are specialists whose work is important for the work of their organization at large. The person who comprehends the critical facts or has the critical insights—the “knowledge specialist” or the “know-how manager”—has tremendous authority and influence on the work of others, and therefore very high leverage. The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity. Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The “delegator” and “delegatee” must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems, a”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“But be sure to know exactly what you’re doing, and avoid the charade of insincere delegation, which can produce immense negative managerial leverage.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Accordingly, managerial output can be linked to managerial activity by the equation: Managerial Output = Output of organization   = L1 × A1 + L2 × A2 +… This equation says that for every activity a manager performs—A1, A2, and so on—the output of the organization should increase by some degree. The extent to which that output is thereby increased is determined by the leverage of that activity—L1, L2, and so on. A manager’s output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage. Clearly the key to high output means being sensitive to the leverage of what you do during the day. Managerial productivity—that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked—can be increased in three ways: 1.  Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work. 2.  Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities. 3.  Shifting the mix of a manager’s activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage. Let us consider first the leverage of various types of managerial work. HIGH-LEVERAGE ACTIVITIES These can be achieved in three basic ways: •  When many people are affected by one manager. •  When a person’s activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager’s brief, well-focused set of words or actions. •  When a large group’s work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“capturing ideas and input will become more and more critical as your life and work become more sophisticated. As you proceed in your career, for instance, you’ll probably notice that your best ideas about work will not come to you at work.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career