Ownership Best Quotes

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

There are four steps to gaining ownership and intentionality over your personal identity and beliefs: Determining your objective function What is the purpose of my life? Determining your ideological tree How do I best fulfill that purpose? Determining your personal identity Who do I want to be? Determining your public identity How do I want others to think of me?

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you're an owner. Faith is at its best when it's that way too. It's best lived when it's owned.

The 7 Steps to Transformation: 1. Dream it. 2. Envision it. 3. Think it. 4. Grow it. 5. Become it. 6. Live it. 7. OWN it.

The best compliment someone can give me is stealing my idea and making it their own.

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges. The best teams anywhere, like the SEAL Teams, are constantly looking to improve, add capability, and push the standards higher. It starts with the individual and spreads to each of the team members until this becomes the culture, the new standard. The recognition that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders facilitates Extreme Ownership and enables leaders to build high-performance teams that dominate on any battlefield, literal or figurative.

Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors.

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

Gratitude was never a noun; it's secretly a verb. It is not a place you accept defeat, settle in for broken dreams or call it the best life will get. Gratitude is getting out of laziness, self pity, denial and insecurity, in order to walk through that door God has been holding open for you this entire time.

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.

The Diminisher is a Micromanager who jumps in and out. The Multiplier is an Investor who gives others ownership and full accountability.

You feel ownership over your creation, your invention, and your ideas. But if you don’t legally claim them, you’re donating them to the public—or to competitors. Say you’ve come up with a solution to a problem. Protecting that potentially valuable IP creates a limited monopoly to keep people out. It’s like zone defense in basketball. IP rights help you own your zone—your competitive space where no one else can score. If the best offense is a great defense, then no offense is the worst.

All identification is for control and ownership.

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you’re an owner. Faith is at its best when it’s that way too. It’s best lived when it’s owned.

Silver noticed that the areas where Trump performed best made for an odd map. Trump performed well in parts of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, as well as the South. He performed notably worse out West. Silver looked for variables to try to explain this map. Was it unemployment? Was it religion? Was it gun ownership? Was it rates of immigration? Was it opposition to Obama? Silver found that the single factor that best correlated with Donald Trump’s support in the Republican primaries was that measure I had discovered four years earlier. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for “nigger.

But this is terrible!" cried Frodo. "Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!" "Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity." "I am sorry," said Frodo. "But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

For leaders, the humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.

But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’ ‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’ ‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’ ‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in. ‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’ ‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

The focus must always be on how to best accomplish the mission.

It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.

But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person's contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people's while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.

You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind - when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them - before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s.

How do you know if someone loves herself? No hairstyle, religion, or ethnicity has ownership of self-love or a greater propensity toward self-hatred. The best way to tell if a woman loves herself is by how she treats herself and others. She makes self-loving choices.

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that’s a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can’t be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can’t be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can’t control how they react to women! And I certainly don’t trust most women around men

At any rate, planning in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement of these plans by the police power. Planning in this sense means full government control of business. It is the antithesis of free enterprise, private initiative, private ownership of the means of production, market economy, and the price system. Planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible. Within a system of planning production is conducted according to the government's orders, not according to the plans of capitalists and entrepreneurs eager to profit by best filling the wants of the consumers.

WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? Most Americans have very little understanding of the degree to which media ownership in America—what we see, hear, and read—is concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations. In fact, I suspect that when people look at the hundreds of channels they receive on their cable system, or the many hundreds of magazines they can choose from in a good bookstore, they assume that there is a wide diversity of ownership. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In 1983 the largest fifty corporations controlled 90 percent of the media. That’s a high level of concentration. Today, as a result of massive mergers and takeovers, six corporations control 90 percent of what we see, hear, and read. This is outrageous, and a real threat to our democracy. Those six corporations are Comcast, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. In 2010, the total revenue of these six corporations was $275 billion. In a recent article in Forbes magazine discussing media ownership, the headline appropriately read: “These 15 Billionaires Own America’s News Media Companies.” Exploding technology is transforming the media world, and mergers and takeovers are changing the nature of ownership. Freepress.net is one of the best media watchdog organizations in the country, and has been opposed to the kind of media consolidation that we have seen in recent years. It has put together a very powerful description of what media concentration means.

remove individual ego and personal agenda. It’s all about the mission. How can you best get your team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?

To not move around, observe, and analyze, in order to make the best decisions possible, was to fail as a leader and fail the team.

She had not quite figured out how best to handle the sense of ownership that people felt over her. She wondered how her father had tolerated it. But she also knew they didn’t touch him the way they touched her.

The ball seems very successful,” she said neutrally. Silver glanced across the room with a smile of casual ownership. He scooped up a plate from the buffet, casually loaded it with a handful of crab pâté puffs, and offered it to her. “I should hope so,” he said. “I’ve invited all the best people. Lords, ladies, authors, ambassadors, debauchers, grave-robbers, perverts, sorcerers, courtesans, deranged scientists, and doll-makers. And a few innocent socialites, of course.

For leaders, the humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it. *   *   *

The best platoons and task units embraced those lessons with Extreme Ownership, acknowledged the problems, and figured out ways to solve them. They constantly improved. The worst units rejected the criticism and complained about how training was too hard.

The rental income served as a dividend, so to speak, but even at an early age, I focused more on the home appreciation. I came to understand the tax advantages of home ownership, implications of depreciation, and the opportunity to use the homes as leverage in borrowing money.

Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best. That is good. But when ego clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the world as it is, then ego becomes destructive. When

So as a leader it is critical to balance the strict discipline of standard procedures with the freedom to adapt, adjust, and manoeuvre to do what is best to support the overarching commander's intent and achieve victory. For leaders, in combat, business, and life, be disciplined, but not rigid.

That was the day I realized that he could not cope and I could not cope and, emotionally, he could take me down with him. And I discovered in myself an awful determination not to let that happen. From that moment, I was determined to get him out of his apartment and under professional eyes, or, failing that, to protect myself. How to protect myself, I didn’t know. Hire help over his objections? Take him to court and seek to have him declared incompetent? Report him to Adult Protective Services? Use my ownership of his apartment to force him out? All I knew was that, at that point, I believed myself capable of doing such things, or even of washing my hands of the situation if he would not listen to reason. I imagined telling an indignant world that I had tried my best and could do no more. You have no idea what a thing it is to have that sort of conversation with yourself about a parent.

Another great example of the power of vulnerability -- this time in a corporation -- is the leadership approach taken by Lululemon's CEO, Christine Day. In a video interview with CNN Money, Day explained that she was once a very bright, smart executive who "majored in being right." Her transformation came when she realized that getting people to engage and take ownership wasn't about "the teling" but about letting them come into the idea in a purpose-led way, and that her job was creating the space for others to perform. She chracterized this change as the shift from "having the best idea or problem solving" to "being the best leader of people.

An aggressive mind-set should be the default setting of any leader. Default: Aggressive. This means that the best leaders, the best teams, don’t wait to act. Instead, understanding the strategic vision (or commander’s intent), they aggressively execute to overcome obstacles, capitalize on immediate opportunities, accomplish the mission, and win.

In regard to what is best for individual people and for society as a whole; ownership of the means of production should belong predominantly to individual people. This is necessary for the people's freedom to be maintained. And, their freedom makes it possible. When the government/state controls of the means of production, the conditions for tyranny are created.

With such variation in individuals on the team, the challenge for any leader was to raise the level of every member of the team so that they could perform at their absolute best. In order to do that, a leader must make it his or her personal mission to train, coach, and mentor members of the team so they perform to the highest standards—or at least the minimum standard. But there is a dichotomy in that goal: while a leader must do everything possible to help develop and improve the performance of individuals on the team, a leader must also understand when someone does not have what it takes to get the job done. When all avenues to help an individual get better are exhausted without success, then it is the leader’s responsibility to fire that individual so he or she does not negatively impact the team.

The best way to let go of the need for control is to become powerful. Power has nothing to do with brawn or domination. It means you have the strength to respond instead of react, to take charge of your life, to have total ownership of your choices. You are powerful because you’re not giving your power away. If you take back your power and still want to be right, then choose to be kind, because kindness is always right.

(...) You Sophotechs are smarter than I am; why did you let me do such a foolish thing?” “We answer every question our resources and instruction parameters allow; we are more than happy to advise you, when and if we are asked.” “That’s not what I’m thinking of, and you know it.” “You are thinking we should use force to defend you against yourself against your will? That is hardly a thought worth thinking, sir. Your life has exactly the value you yourself place on it. It is yours to damage or ruin as you wish.” (...) “Is that another hint? Are you saying I’m destroying my life? People at the party, twice now, have said or implied that I’m going to endanger the Oecumene itself. Who stopped me?” “Not I. While life continues, it cannot be made to be without risk. The assessment of whether or not a certain risk is worth taking depends on subjective value-judgments. About such judgments even reasonable men can differ. We Sophotechs will not interfere with such decisions. (...) If we were to overrule your ownership of your own life, your life, would, in effect, become our property, and you, in effect, would become merely the custodian or trustee of that life. Do you think you would value it more in such a case, or less? And if you valued it less, would you not take greater risks and behave more self-destructively? If, on the other hand, each man’s life is his own, he may experiment freely, risking only what is his, till he find his best happiness.” “I see the results of failed experiments all around us, in these cylinders. I see wasted lives, and people trapped in mind sets and life forms which lead nowhere.” “While life continues, experimentation and evolution must also. The pain and risk of failure cannot be eliminated. The most we can do is maximize human freedom, so that no man is forced to pay for another man’s mistakes, so that the pain of failure falls only on he who risks it. And you do not know which ways of life lead nowhere. Even we Sophotechs do not know where all paths lead.” “How benevolent of you! We will always be free to be stupid.” “Cherish that freedom, young master; it is basic to all others.

Recently, I watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory. One of the characters, Howard—an astrophysicist—is in space. His new bride, Bernadette, convinces him that it would be best if they lived by themselves when he comes back to earth and not with his loud, annoying mother. Howard agrees. He’s too scared to take ownership of the decision, so he pitches it to his mother like it was his wife’s idea. The mother yells so loud, she barely needs any equipment to be heard in space. Howard dutifully tells her that he will convince Bernadette and they’ll live with her. When Bernadette calls, he doesn’t have the, er, balls, to tell her the truth either. So he tells her all is well with the move. His counterpart, a Russian astronaut, cannot believe his country lost the Cold War to wusses like Howard. When he asks him what he plans to do, Howard has only one option. He’ll stay in space. Earth is where there are problems between his wife and mother. He’s safe in space. He’s not the only one. The world is full of conflicted husbands wishing they could be in space and

We still own 38 percent of the company’s stock today, which is an unusually large stake for anyone to hold in an outfit the size of Wal-Mart, and that’s the best protection there is against the takeover raiders. It’s something that any family who has faith in its strength as a unit and in the growth potential of its business can do. The transfer of ownership was made so long ago that we didn’t have to pay substantial gift or inheritance taxes on it. The principle behind this is simple: the best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.

The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power. The effect in the latter is that the fish rots from the head down — lawlessness permeates the state, as in a mafia family, because contending leaders must build informal coalitions. Since another name for a monarchist is a legitimist, we can contrast the legitimist and demotist theories of government. […] Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see legitimism as a sort of proto-formalism. The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary. The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies. However, the trouble with corporate monarchism is that it presents no obvious political formula. “Because it does” cuts no ice with a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. […] So the legitimist system went down another path, which led eventually to its destruction: the path of divine-right monarchy. When everyone believes in God, “because God says so” is a much more impressive formula. Perhaps the best way to look at demotism is to see it as the Protestant version of rule by divine right — based on the theory of vox populi, vox dei. If you add divine-right monarchy to a religious system that is shifting from the worship of God to the worship of Man, demotism is pretty much what you’d expect to precipitate in the beaker.

give a credit. Or whatever else we think is best.” Like 140 or so of her fellow employees, Michelle was an owner of ECCO. She was a member of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that controlled 58 percent of the company’s stock. When I met her, her stake was worth $12,000. More important, she felt like an owner and believed she was treated like one. She had a lot of direct contact with the CEO, Ed Zimmer. Among other things, he held a regular monthly lunch with all the people who had a birthday that month, and they talked about themselves and the company and whatever else they wanted to discuss.

The only way attackers can process invalid transactions is if they own over half of the compute power of the network, so it’s critical that no single entity ever exceeds 50 percent ownership. If they do, then they can perform what’s referred to as a 51 percent attack, in which they process invalid transactions. This involves spending money they don’t have and would ruin confidence in the cryptoasset. The best way to prevent this attack from happening is to have so many computers supporting the blockchain in a globally decentralized topography that no single entity could hope to buy enough computers to take majority share.

Even in the best of times, when we’re not stressed or needy, many of us enjoy petting our dogs as much as any other aspect of dog ownership. This is not a trivial need. Quiet stroking can significantly change your body’s physiology, lowering your heart rate and blood pressure. It releases endogenous opiates, or internal chemicals that calm and soothe us and play a significant role in good health. Lucky for us, most of our dogs adore being touched. Most normal, well-socialized dogs cherish getting belly rubs and head massages and butt scratches. Many dogs like grooming so much that they’re willing to work for it, pawing or barking whenever needed to remind their human not to stop.

The Disease of Me Dominance Lesson 1. There is no i in team but there is an i in win. Lesson 2. Everything you do, you do to the team. Lesson 3. Get out of yourself and into the team. Lesson 4. Don’t forget the fundamentals. Lesson 5. You can have no flickering lights. Lesson 6. Do not allow mistakes to go uncorrected. Lesson 7. Having skill is not having talent. Lesson 8. You must trust, not just believe. Lesson 9. Sometimes what is best for the individual is not what is best for the team. Lesson 10. Teams must take ownership for themselves and their personalities. Lesson 11. Teams that play together often end up lucky. Lesson 12. With your A game, you can beat anybody; anything less and they can beat you.

Jae reflected on the leader’s role: “You can jump in and teach and coach, but then you have to give the pen back. When you give that pen back, your people know they are still in charge.” When something is off the rails, do you take over or do you invest? When you take the pen to add your ideas, do you give it back? Or does it stay in your pocket? Multipliers invest in the success of others. They may jump in to teach and share their ideas, but they always return to accountability. When leaders fail to return ownership, they create dependent organizations. This is the way of the Diminisher. They jump in, save the day, and drive results through their personal involvement. When leaders return the pen, they cement the accountability for action where it should be. This creates organizations that are free from the nagging need of the leader’s rescue.

He expects it from Malcolm and Harold; Malcolm because he is happy and sees a single path—his path—to happiness, and so therefore occasionally asks him if he can set him up with someone, or if he wants to find someone, and then is bewildered when he declines; Harold because he knows that the part of the parental role Harold most enjoys is inserting himself into his life and rooting about in it as best as he can. He has grown to enjoy this too, sometimes—he is touched that someone is interested enough in him to order him around, to be disappointed by the decisions he makes, to have expectations for him, to assume the responsibility of ownership of him. Two years ago, he and Harold were at a restaurant and Harold was giving him a lecture about how his job at Rosen Pritchard had made him essentially an accessory to corporate malfeasance, when they both realized that their waiter was standing above them, holding his pad before him

The cleaning woman could contain herself no longer, As far as I'm concerned, that's the boat for me, And who are you, asked the man, Don't you remember me, No, I don't, I'm the cleaning woman, Cleaning what, The king's palace, The woman who opened the door for petitions, The very same, And why aren't you back at the king's palace cleaning and opening doors, Because the doors I really wanted to open have already been opened and because, from now on, I will only clean boats, So you want to go with me in search of the unknown island, I left the palace by the door of decisions, In that case, go and have a look at the caravel, after all this time, it must be in need of a good wash, but watch out for the seagulls, they're not to be trusted, Don't you want to come with me and see what your boat is like inside, You said it was your boat, Sorry about that, I only said it because I liked it, Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

One of the reasons why a privileged society based on the privilege of property and rank must give way to a society where people are rewarded according to their ability and their contribution to society is that it is only when people are encouraged to give their best that society progresses. No society has existed in history where all people were equal and obtained equal rewards. If that were to be practiced, and the lazy and the incompetent were paid as much as the industrious and the intelligent, it would end up by all the good people giving as little of themselves so as not to give more than their weaker brethren. But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.

You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price. At the price I suggested, I calculated that we would lock in a 16 percent annual yield.

1. Value my ability to see the world from a unique perspective. (Find ways to appreciate and make the most of my strengths, even when I annoy you). 2. Remember, we need compelling problems to solve, not just chores to do. (Don't be the "big boss." I'll respect your authority more when you tell me the point). 3. Ask for my input; keep me in the informational loop. (Give me some ownership in the process and the outcome). 4. Protect our relationship - you won't get much from me without one. (Respect and value who I am, and I'll cooperate with you most of the time). 5. Smile at me more often. (Keep your sense of humor and try to smile, even when you don't like me). 6. Don't let me push you around, but don't push me around either. (Don't be afraid to stand up to me; just don't run over me). 7. Speak to me respectfully, but firmly. (Use your voice wisely; it's a powerful resource). 8. Choose your battles - don't sweat the small stuff. (Decide what's really worth it). 9. Give me some control over my own life and circumstances. (Allow me to share control with our surrendering your authority). 10. Remind me how much you love me. (Find subtle ways to keep reminding me your love will always be there).

Don’t come to someone with feedback (or a problem) unless you have one or more solutions—In this approach the responsibility lies with the person giving the feedback to also come up with the best solution for acting on the feedback. That sounds totally reasonable and helpful: you’re telling people about the problem and the solution in one bite. • The feedback sandwich—You know this one. You open with good news, slip in some bad news, and then close with good news. That way, the person in front of you is opened up for the bad news by hearing the good news and still likes you in the end because you’ve closed with something good.6 And we’re supposed to give more positive feedback than negative feedback (the best ratio is at least 3:17), so this puts us well on our way to that. • Socratic questioning—Here, you leave people to draw their own conclusions by simply asking a set of helpful questions to take them to the realization that there’s an issue (and the hope is that they’ll then ask you for a solution or even stumble on your solution and offer it up as if it were their own). This, we’re told, increases ownership of the issue because the other person—the person needing to change—came up with the idea himself.

This neo-liberal establishment would have us believe that, during its miracle years between the 1960s and the 1980s, Korea pursued a neo-liberal economic development strategy. The reality, however, was very different indeed. What Korea actually did during these decades was to nurture certain new industries, selected by the government in consultation with the private sector, through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support (e.g., overseas marketing information services provided by the state export agency) until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition. The government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business-credit. Some big projects were undertaken directly by state-owned enterprises-the steel maker, POSCO, being the best example-although the country had a pragmatic, rather than ideological, attitude to the issue of state ownership. If private enterprises worked well, that was fine; if they did not invest in important areas, the government had no qualms about setting up state-owned enterprises (SOEs); and if some private enterprises were mismanaged, the government often took them over, restructured them, and usually (but not always) sold them off again.

When Joe and I went to meet Goldman’s real estate team, though, we found they had a different view of the risks of this deal. Goldman wanted to bid as low as possible to avoid overpaying. For me, the biggest risk was not offering enough and missing out on a tremendous opportunity. I wanted to make sure we beat Bankers Trust’s expected bid. You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price.

As an experiment, I tweaked the questions using Kelly’s “Did I do my best to” formulation. • Did I do my best to be happy? • Did I do my best to find meaning? • Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? • Did I do my best to be a good husband? Suddenly, I wasn’t being asked how well I performed but rather how much I tried. The distinction was meaningful to me because in my original formulation, if I wasn’t happy or I ignored Lyda, I could always blame it on some factor outside myself. I could tell myself I wasn’t happy because the airline kept me on the tarmac for three hours (in other words, the airline was responsible for my happiness). Or I overate because a client took me to his favorite barbecue joint, where the food was abundant, caloric, and irresistible (in other words, my client—or was it the restaurant?—was responsible for controlling my appetite). Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process. After a few weeks using this checklist, I noticed an unintended consequence. Active questions themselves didn’t merely elicit an answer. They created a different level of engagement with my goals. To give an accurate accounting of my effort, I couldn’t simply answer yes or no or “30 minutes.” I had to rethink how I phrased my answers. For one thing, I had to measure my effort. And to make it meaningful—that is, to see if I was trending positively, actually making progress—I had to measure on a relative scale, comparing the most recent day’s effort with previous days. I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.

Underlying this book is the assumption that governing a company and managing it are different activities requiring different job designs. We maintain that governance is best seen as existing outside the phenomenon of management and inside the phenomenon of ownership. Governance operates at a level that transcends current issues and specific company traditions and elevates people to a higher conceptual plane, one from which accountability can be seen more clearly. Governance requires and engenders a passion for leadership, leadership that is not just over others but on others' behalf.

The leader must pull the different elements within the team together to support one another, with all focused exclusively on how to best accomplish the mission.

I began to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them.

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement. They exhibited Extreme Ownership, and as a result, their SEAL platoons and task units dominated. When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else,

The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.

5. INSTILL OWNERSHIP AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Multipliers deliver and sustain superior results by inculcating high expectations across the organization. By serving as Investors, Multipliers provide necessary resources for success. In addition, they hold people accountable for their commitments.

A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following: • Analyze the mission. —Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal). —Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission. • Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available. • Decentralize the planning process. —Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action. • Determine a specific course of action. —Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action. —Focus efforts on the best course of action. • Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action. • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation. • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible. • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders. —Stand back and be the tactical genius. • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation. • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets. —Emphasize Commander’s Intent. —Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand. • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. —Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.

With Extreme Ownership, you must remove individual ego and personal agenda. It’s all about the mission. How can you best get your team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?” I

When students are taught to approach argument through inquiry, good things happen: they choose topics worthy of arguing, they gain ownership (through choice) of their writing, and their teacher is not stuck in Groundhog Day reading the same argument paper over and over. Key

With Extreme Ownership, you must remove individual ego and personal agenda. It’s all about the mission. How can you best get your team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement.

Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best. That is good. But when ego clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the world as it is, then ego becomes destructive. When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues. Many of the disruptive issues that arise within any team can be attributed directly to a problem with ego.

What makes the best leaders and best teams great is that when they make mistakes, they acknowledge them, take ownership, and make corrections to upgrade their performance.

Avoid matrix structures. In an attempt to have the best of both worlds, some companies make the mistake of creating matrix organizations. Don’t do this. Matrix structures remove the fire of personal ownership, not to mention accountability.

In 1931, Japan went broke—i.e., it was forced to draw down its gold reserves, abandon the gold standard, and float its currency, which depreciated it so greatly that Japan ran out of buying power. These terrible conditions and large wealth gaps led to fighting between the left and the right. By 1932, there was a massive upsurge in right-wing nationalism and militarism, in the hope that order and economic stability could be forcibly restored. Japan set out to get the natural resources (e.g., oil, iron, coal, and rubber) and human resources (i.e., slave labor) it needed by seizing them from other countries, invading Manchuria in 1931 and spreading out through China and Asia. As with Germany, it could be argued that Japan’s path of military aggression to get needed resources was more cost-effective than relying on classic trading and economic practices. In 1934, there was severe famine in parts of Japan, causing even more political turbulence and reinforcing the right-wing, militaristic, nationalistic, and expansionistic movement. In the years that followed, Japan’s top-down fascist command economy grew stronger, building a military-industrial complex to protect its existing bases in East Asia and northern China and support its excursions into other countries. As was also the case in Germany, while most Japanese companies remained privately held, their production was controlled by the government. What is fascism? Consider the following three big choices that a country has to make when selecting its approach to governance: 1) bottom-up (democratic) or top-down (autocratic) decision making, 2) capitalist or communist (with socialist in the middle) ownership of production, and 3) individualistic (which treats the well-being of the individual with paramount importance) or collectivist (which treats the well-being of the whole with paramount importance). Pick the one from each category that you believe is optimal for your nation’s values and ambitions and you have your preferred approach. Fascism is autocratic, capitalist, and collectivist. Fascists believe that top-down autocratic leadership, in which the government directs the production of privately held companies such that individual gratification is subordinated to national success, is the best way to make the country and its people wealthier and more powerful.

One of the surest ways to strike that balance is to ask a simple set of coaching questions that help the other person reach their own insights. By doing this, you leave the other person with the sense of autonomy and ownership that psychologists have found to be so important for high performance. You still get to guide and challenge their thinking, but in a way that gives you confidence that they’ll succeed. It’s the best of both worlds. So what are these magical coaching questions? They’re based on something known as the “GROW model”—because they walk people through steps called the goal, reality, options, and way forward: Goal. What does the ideal outcome look like? Reality. What’s the current situation—the good and the bad? Options. What are the options for moving forward? (Always start with the other person’s ideas. Tell them you’re happy to add yours, but that you want to start with theirs.) Way forward. What is their first step going to be? When will they take it? What help do they need?

In retrospect, the first half of my life was spent conforming, complying, and consenting to the life that was prescribed to me by my dear ones till I gave myself permission to be me. All this didn’t happen till I dumped the expectations of others that had been affecting my own decision-making and recovered ownership of my choices. It didn’t happen till I let go of the things that gave me the illusion of purpose and identity.

Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves. Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.' As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.' The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.

if the planning process gets bogged down or different members of the team can’t agree on a course of action, it might be necessary for the leader to step in and provide guidance or even make a decision on which course of action to use. But it is almost always preferred for the leader to lead from the rear, to allow the troops to take the lead on the plan and to take ownership of it. The best ideas often come from the people on the team who are closest to the problem; those are the folks on the front line. Don’t inhibit them; instead, allow them the freedom and authority to create and execute new plans and ideas. They have the knowledge. Give them the power. Don’t feel the need to always

First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.

It’s an important reminder: Success is a result of what we do all of the time. The highest performers in all walks of life have embraced this fact; they have taken full ownership and have chosen to create and implement positive habits. They understand that you can’t be selective when it comes to excellence. As the saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.

Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.

There’s a kind of ownership that comes with having a best friend like her; this little collection of understandings you keep like charms on a bracelet. “I know you. Here’s the bracelet to prove it.

In some cases, the answers to who attacked and how will never be known. Regardless, leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear. That results in inaction. It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.

Initially the common ownership theory was dismissed as a loony idea from ivory-tower economists. After all, the airline industry is infamously bankruptcy-prone and looked like poor evidence of anticompetitive behavior, overt or otherwise. Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur, once joked that the best way to become an aviation millionaire was to be a billionaire and invest in an airline. However, the theory gradually started to garner attention. “Are Index Funds Evil?” was the provocative title of one piece examining the subject in The Atlantic in 2017.18

They will try to cage us. Attempt to limit, constrain, make us compliant, take control. No, they may never stop coming for us & our bodies. Remember: we were made for changing times & battle lines. Born of the wombs of paradigm shifters & revolutionaries. We have evolved & changed & demanded what is ours since the beginning of time. We will not stop now. No matter how much the ground shifts beneath your feet, you must remember: You are no lone wolf. You were born for the hunt. Strong men will cower before you. If they come for you—as they have & will—draw yourself into the fullness of your feral power, look them in the eye & remember: The howl of you can never be contained. A message to those who would try: Know this. To tame a wild thing is never an act of love. It is an act of containment, of force. A call against nature and instinct and the primal force of the shadows. Consider this your warning: I am calling things forth now. I am claiming space & defining territory. I am declaring my own agency & ownership of my body. I am rooting in ritual & rising in power. If you come to me now—if you want to love me, or gain access to my holy body, to make art by my side, enter my circle, or gain my trust—you must first listen, & listen well. The rules of engagement are mine alone, to make and break and change at will. Do not try to quiet my voice. Do not attempt to soften my edges or tame my prowl. I am inhabiting my wild. I am encompassing the dance. I am no longer burning down. That time is over. I am the white-hot ignition. I am starting the fire. I am rising like flame. Want to come with me? Then step closer to the heat. Meet me in the sliver of space between passion and truth where all is red-hot, & even the shadows are dancing. Meet me there, in the heart of the wild. Come with your naked skin & your own hallowed heat. Leave behind your attempts to control a damn thing. If you intend to love a wolf, you'd best come ready to hear her howl.

For spring and summer, Dina baked delicate and light pastries fragranced with rosewater, meskouta orange bundt cake, and delicate raspberry macarons. When strawberries were in season in early June, she made airy fraisier cake. For autumn and winter, Dina worked with heavier ingredients: thick, dark chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom, gingerbread, and pumpkin. As the days grew colder and the light dimmed earlier and earlier, people started to crave that feeling of warmth and comfort. And Dina would give that to them, even if only for a short while. One special bake for this season was a ginger and persimmon cake, yellowed with saffron strands, which Dina had bought on her last trip to Morocco, and fresh vanilla pods, their sweet scent so potent that it wafted across the café. This was in addition to all the regular pastries and cakes she had on offer, which were all recipes her mother had taught her to bake. The cake made with dark honey from the Atlas mountains was an all-time customer favorite. Dina had imbibed it with a very specific spell, a childhood memory of a time that she must have fallen asleep on a car ride home, and although she was a little too big to be carried, she remembered her father lifting her into his arms, her mother closing the car door softly so as not to wake her, then carrying her upstairs and tucking her into bed. When she'd been fashioning the spell for the first time, it had occurred to Dina that one day your parents put you down and they never picked you up again, and so she'd made the honey cake to recreate that feeling of childhood comfort. That sensation of someone taking the utmost care of you, holding you close, was a feeling that many in the rushing city of London didn't experience often. Sometimes she wondered if she was really in the business of café ownership, or if she was more of a fairy godmother in disguise. Undeniably, the magical pastries were great at keeping customers coming back for more, so that was a bonus on the businesswoman side of things.

For railroads, ownership of coal lands was a way to stabilize an industry levered to economic volatility and weather, with warmer winters depressing demand. The vertical integration of railroads and miners also helped the players control production and shipments. The industry became highly concentrated, with seven railroad companies controlling over 90% of the coal production in the region. This oligopoly occasionally entered into collusive arrangements and tried to manipulate the price of this critical energy source. Despite these advantages, the Reading Railroad’s spending spree eventually led to trouble, as the combination of leverage, competition, and economic volatility caused the company to declare bankruptcy three times between 1880 and 1896.143 The Reading finally experienced financial success in the early 1900s, only to confront a new problem: The federal government was now determined to curb the power of the railroad and its peers. Congress began to enact legislation designed to split anthracite coal producers from railroads. These early attempts were easily circumvented by the anthracite giants. In 1915, however, the Supreme Court started ruling that the railroad companies violated anti-trust law. In 1920, the Court banned the stock control of coal companies outright, which finally forced some of the largest anthracite operators, including the Reading Railroad, to separate their coal and railroad operations.144

Geithner’s proposed terms for the loan—which drew heavily on the work of bankers he had asked to explore options for private financing for AIG—included a floating interest rate starting at about 11.5 percent. AIG would also be required to give the government an ownership share of almost 80 percent of the company. Tough terms were appropriate. Given our relative unfamiliarity with the company, the difficulty of valuing AIG FP’s complex derivatives positions, and the extreme conditions we were seeing in financial markets, lending such a large amount inevitably entailed significant risk. Evidently, it was risk that no private-sector firm had been willing to undertake. Taxpayers deserved adequate compensation for bearing that risk. In particular, the requirement that AIG cede a substantial part of its ownership was intended to ensure that taxpayers shared in the gains if the company recovered. Equally important, tough terms helped address the unfairness inherent in aiding AIG and not other firms, while also serving to mitigate the moral hazard arising from the bailout. If executives at similarly situated firms believed they would get easy terms in a government bailout, they would have little incentive to raise capital, reduce risk, or accept market offers for their assets or their company. The Fed and Treasury had pushed for tough terms for the shareholders of Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie for precisely these reasons. The political backlash would be intense no matter what we did, but we needed to show that we got taxpayers the best possible deal and had minimized the windfall that the bailout gave to AIG and its shareholders.

we are confident that the fundamental principle of long-term ownership of quality companies is a sensible one, new

A kingdom church is a society of individuals who are expressing their Christianity through their lifestyles. This means that it is theoretically possible to be an amazing church without a single ‘program’ or ministry. Of course, that sounds very counterintuitive. After all, most churches are scrambling to have the best youth/singles/children’s ministries in town. But it is possible. As God’s people continue to be validated as priests and as ‘kingdomizers’ in whatever sphere of influence they find themselves, then the ministry of the church will return to the hands of the people. Again, this isn’t anarchy. This is empowerment, ownership, and responsibility.

all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all

Asherah added, “That may be our best course. But if we attack too soon, we could lose all.” Dagon paused, ceremoniously displaying his judging thoughtfulness. Then he said, “You make a good argument, Ba’al.” Ba’al concluded, “I humbly recommend we wait and watch. For years, if we have to. Use Asherah’s freedom there to spy. If what Molech says is true, and this Saul is corruptible, then we only increase our chances by uncovering and exploiting his weakness over time. If, after all, he is not corruptible and proves to be the messiah king, then our cult of assassins will be fully trained and fully capable of providing the means necessary for extinguishing his lamp.” “Agreed,” said Dagon. “Your counsel has proven most helpful, my son. My trust in you increases daily.” Good, thought Ba’al to himself, Because when you are the most unsuspecting, then I will gut you and filet you like the fish that you are. And with the help of Asherah, I will take back my rightful ownership of this land, and with it, the Sons of Abraham.

(When I use the term “my” in reference to an animal, I mean it only in the most endearing way, much like one would say “my best friend” or “my beloved,” rather than thinking in terms of ownership. I’ve always thought of animals as individual beings worthy of our respect, rather than mere property that we own. When the word “pet” is used in this book, it means “beloved animal who is a part of the family”; it does not mean possession. When we share our lives with animals, we become their guardians; not their owners.)

For leaders, the humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it. *

Stewardship is making the most out of what you already have. Rather than hoping for more, stewardship is reflective of gratitude and ownership. The best stewards take what they have and make it better. These people are ready for more because they have fully embraced all they have been given. Far

O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’ ‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.

Laying down a challenge means more than directing people to do it. It includes asking the hard questions that no one yet has the answers to and then backing off so that the people within the organization have the space to think through the questions, take ownership, and find the answers.

learning—we have learned how to increase productivity, the outputs that can be produced with any inputs. There are two aspects of learning that we can distinguish: an improvement in best practices, reflected in increases in productivity of firms that marshal all available knowledge and technology, and improvements in the productivity of firms as they catch up to best practices. In fact, the distinction may be somewhat artificial; there may be no firm that has employed best practices in every aspect of its activities. One firm may be catching up with another in some dimension, but the second firm may be catching up with the first in others. In developing countries, almost all firms may be catching up with global best practices; but the real difference between developing and developed countries is the larger fraction of firms that are significantly below global best practices and the larger gap between their productivity and that of the best-performing firms. While we are concerned in this book with both aspects of learning, it is especially the learning associated with catching up that we believe has been given short shrift in the economics literature, and which is central to improvements in standards of living, especially in developing countries. But as we noted in chapter 1, the two are closely related; because of the improvements in best practices by the most innovative firms, most other firms are always engaged in a process of catching up. While the evidence of Solow and the work that followed demonstrated (what to many seems obvious) the importance of learning for increases in standards of living, to further explicate the role of learning, the first three sections of this chapter marshal other macro- and microeconomic evidence. In particular, we stress the pervasive gap between best practices and the productivity of most firms. We argue that this gap is far more important than the traditional allocative inefficiencies upon which most of economics has focused and is related to learning—or more accurately, the lack of learning. The final section provides a theoretical context within which to think about the sources of sustained increases in standards of living, employing the familiar distinction of movements of the production possibilities curve and movements toward the production possibilities curve. Using this framework, we explain why it is that we ascribe such importance to learning. Macroeconomic Perspectives There are several empirical arguments that can be brought to bear to support our conclusion concerning the importance of learning. The first is a simple argument: In theory, leading-edge technology is globally available. Thus, with sufficient capital and trained labor (or sufficient mobility for capital and trained labor), all countries should enjoy comparable standards of living. The only difference would be the rents associated with ownership of intellectual property rights and factor supplies. Yet there is an enormous divergence in economic performance and standards of living across national economies, far greater than can be explained by differences in factor supplies.1 And this includes many low-performing economies with high levels of capital intensity (especially among formerly socialist economies) and highly trained labor forces. Table 2.1 presents a comparison of formerly socialist countries with similar nonsocialist economies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the state-controlled model of economic activity. TABLE 2.1 Quality of Life Comparisons, 1992–1994 (U.S. $) Source: Greenwald and Khan (2009), p. 30. In most of these cases, at the time communism was imposed after World War II, the subsequently socialist economies enjoyed higher levels of economic development than

Great mentors don't solve your problems, they guide you to make your best decision and encourage you to take personal ownership of the next steps for success.