Path To Executable Quotes

The core practice of magic is: The execution of a willed intent to create change in the material world, which either defies, hastens or purifies the consequences of natural cause and effect.

The role of charity is to fill in the gap where business has not yet discovered or executed a profitable path at maximum distribution.

Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them

Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That’s true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization. Execution

Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me. Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down. The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway. Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing. And then rising from within me is a single thought: I don’t want to die. All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no. Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live. I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to! Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes. Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live. Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other. I’m not done! I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine. I am not done here! She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes. “The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.” The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation. My heart begins to race. Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all? All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move. Then the heart monitor stops beeping.

Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.

Consider an AI that has hedonism as its final goal, and which would therefore like to tile the universe with “hedonium” (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for the generation of pleasurable experience). To this end, the AI might produce computronium (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for computation) and use it to implement digital minds in states of euphoria. In order to maximize efficiency, the AI omits from the implementation any mental faculties that are not essential for the experience of pleasure, and exploits any computational shortcuts that according to its definition of pleasure do not vitiate the generation of pleasure. For instance, the AI might confine its simulation to reward circuitry, eliding faculties such as a memory, sensory perception, executive function, and language; it might simulate minds at a relatively coarse-grained level of functionality, omitting lower-level neuronal processes; it might replace commonly repeated computations with calls to a lookup table; or it might put in place some arrangement whereby multiple minds would share most parts of their underlying computational machinery (their “supervenience bases” in philosophical parlance). Such tricks could greatly increase the quantity of pleasure producible with a given amount of resources.

d. In designing your organization, remember that the 5-Step Process is the path to success and that different people are good at different steps. Assign specific people to do each of these steps based on their natural inclinations. For example, the big-picture visionary should be responsible for goal setting, the taste tester should be assigned the job of identifying and not tolerating problems, the logical detective who doesn’t mind probing people should be the diagnoser, the imaginative designer should craft the plan to make the improvements, and the reliable taskmaster should make sure the plan gets executed. Of course, some people can do more than one of these things—generally people do two or three well. Virtually nobody can do them all well. A team should consist of people with all of these abilities and they should know who is responsible for which steps.

But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution, inciting them on the one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means, than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed.

We spend far too much of our lives at work to have it be in opposition to the person we desire to be.

The author of The Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qu'ran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing.

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

The planning process includes at least the following six functions: forming a representation of the problem, choosing a goal, deciding to plan, formulating a plan, executing and monitoring the plan, and learning from the plan.[

Holiness is not a cute suggestion. It’s not a pragmatic recommendation, either. It’s not a footnote in the grand-narrative of Scripture, nor is it one option among many. It is an executive order from the highest office in the universe. Indeed,

Heed the call. Take the leap. But do not go off half-cocked. Plan it out. Take that full day. Take more than one. Take as many as necessary to develop your plan. But do it, and then, execute it. You won’t be sorry. You will be on your path to bliss.

In any sizable park or green space, you’ll likely find two kinds of paths: the formal kind, paved with brick or concrete, and the informal kind, the paths made by people walking over and over a stretch of grass, wearing away the green and carving a scruffy emergent line in its place. These are paths made by sheer repetitive use; they’re not anyone’s executive decision but arise one choice at a time, collected in aggregate. Most of us know them as friendly disobedience: they’re shortcuts, maybe, or just the most commonsense pathway from one frequented site to another. Urban planners call these paths “desire lines,” or sometimes “cow paths,” “pirate paths,” or the slightly stuffier “counter-grid trajectories.” They indicate yearning, some planners say—either to have formal paved lines where there are none or to actively carve out a different path where one had been prescribed.

There can have been no doubt in Eleanor's mind as to what was expected of her as a wife. In her day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside and outside marriage, virginity and celibacy being highly prized states. When it came to fornication, women were usually apportioned the blame, because they were the descendants of Eve, who had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, with such dire consequences. Women, the Church taught, were the weaker vessel, the gateway to the Devil, and therefore the source of all lechery. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life." Noblewomen, he felt, were the most dangerous so fall. Women were therefore kept firmly in their place in order to prevent them from luring men away from the paths of righteousness. Promiscuity--and its often inevitable consequence, illicit pregnancy--brought great shame upon a woman and her family, and was punishable by fines, social ostracism, and even, in the case of aristocratic and royal women, execution. Unmarried women who indulged in fornication devalued themselves on the marriage market. In England, women who were sexually experienced were not permitted to accuse men of rape in the King's court. Female adultery was seen as a particularly serious offence, since it jeopardized the laws of inheritance. Men, however, often indulged in casual sex and adultery with impunity. Because the virtue of high-born women was jealously guarded, many men sought sexual adventures with lower-class women. Prostitution was common and official brothels were licensed and subject to inspection in many areas. There was no effective contraception apart from withdrawal, and the Church frowned upon that anyway: this was why so many aristocratic and royal bastards were born during this period.

(Hitler had a constitutional duty to consider each appeal for clemency and sign the execution warrant.) In bygone times the condemned criminal had had the traditional right to see the Kaiser's signature on the warrant before being led to the scaffold. In Hitler's era, the usages were less picturesque. A telephone call went from Schaub to Lammers in Berlin: ‘The Führer has turned down the appeal for clemency’ – this sufficed to rubber-stamp a facsimile of the Führer's signature on the execution warrant. On one occasion the file laid before Hitler stated simply that the Berlin Chancellery would ‘take the necessary steps’ if they had heard no decision from him by ten P.M. that night. Human life was becoming cheaper in the new Germany. When it was at its cheapest, at the time of Stalingrad, Walther Hewel was to explain to an OKW staff officer, ‘If you want to understand the way the Führer's mind works, you must look upon the human race as being just a swarm of ants.’ However,

It is so rare to have a new tent appear that Celia considers canceling her performances entirely in order to spend the evening investigating it. Instead she waits, executing her standard number of shows, finishing the last a few hours before dawn. Only then does she navigate her way through nearly empty pathways to find the latest edition to the circus. The sign proclaims something called the Ice Garden. and Celia smiles at the addendum below which contains an apology for any thermal inconvenience. Despite the name, she is not prepared for what awaits her inside the tent. It is exactly what the sign described. But it is so much more than that. There are no stripes visible on the walls, everything is sparkling and white. She cannot tell how far it stretches, the size of the tent obscured by cascading willows and twisting vines. The air itself is magical. Crisp and sweet in her lungs as she breathes, sending a shiver down to her toes that is caused by more than the forewarned drop in temperature. There are no patrons in the tent as she explores, circling alone around trellises covered in pale roses and a softly bubbling, elaborately carved fountain. And everything, save for occasional lengths of whet silk ribbon strung like garlands, is made of ice. Curious, Celia picks a frosted peony from its branch, the stem breaking easily. But the layered petals shatter, falling from her fingers to the ground, disappearing in the blades of ivory grass below. When she looks back at the branch, an identical bloom has already appeared. Celia cannot imagine how much power and skill it would take not only to construct such a thing but to maintain it as well. And she longs to know how her opponent came up with the idea. Aware that each perfectly structured topiary, every detail down to the stones that line the paths like pearls, must have been planned.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

They say everything happens for a reason. I can see the truth within that now. If it was not for all the mishaps, all the drama, all the heartache, all the stress that I have endured within the last six months I would not have the book that I have just published, nor the works for the next two books that I am currently working on. If I would have had my cake to eat it as well I may still be stuck where was six months ago. Or worst I may have a regular job. YIKES!!! But in retrospect everything that has happened to me in the last six month I now take with wisdom and a thankful heart for all of the turbulence within my life, as crazy as that sounds. Sometimes it is when you hit rock bottom that you can begin to reach for the stars and beyond. Today I shed the last of my painful tears and I released myself of the countless disappointments within my heart. I am now totally focused on my path. I have already reached many plateaus to meet my ultimate goal of being an accomplished author. I have tried it many times and now it is my time to shine. I have full knowledge of what to do and how to execute my master plan. Within time my words will ascend to the four corners of the universe and I will be on my way to travel the world and see all the great sites this beautiful planet has to offer.

The internet itself led him from one word to the next, giving links, pointing out. When it didn’t know something it tactfully kept quiet or stubbornly showed him the same pages, ad nauseam. Then Kunicki had the impression that he had just landed at the border of the known world, at the wall, at the membrane of the heavenly firmament. There wasn’t any way to break through it with his head and look through. The internet is a fraud. It promises so much—that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfillment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiply, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive, dear Kunicki. What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at? You feel like spreading out your arms and plunging into it, into that abyss, but there is nothing more deceptive: the landscape turns out to be a wallpaper, you can’t go any farther.

A sous-chef with dreams of her own restaurant empire may have mastered the art of classical French sauce making, but not yet have developed the signature cooking style she imagines as the cornerstone of her own chain of restaurants. She gauges her progress not only by whether she is moving toward her aspirations, but also by her improving skills. Our chef may not yet have the stature of Chef Auguste Escoffier or Emeril Lagasse, but she can remember a time when she could not name the five French mother sauces, let alone execute them. She's made progress. Appreciating the skills she has developed is a marker along the path toward her culinary aspirations. The sense of accomplishment that accompanies improved skills is one of the rewards we reap when we dedicate ourselves to mastery.

Leaders nourish and uphold the culture of an organization. They make choices that inevitably limit the size and scope of activities that the organization undertakes. A good leader will only work in a firm where there is clear and effective governance to protect the culture, philosophy and investment discipline of the firm. The most effective leaders create a non-hierarchical environment in which idea sharing is encouraged, and diligent execution is rewarded. They also establish a solid foundation, a durable framework, and processes for successfully managing an organization that can maintain these qualities. And last, a great investment leader has a zero tolerance policy for breaches of integrity. By integrity, we mean not only honesty and fulfillment of fiduciary obligation, but process integrity.

But if you are agreed to carry out this plan, there is one further counsel which I would urge upon you. Send to Dodona and to Delphi, I would beg you, and consult the will of Heaven whether such a provision and such a policy on our part be truly to the interest of Athens both for the present and for the time to come. If the consent of Heaven be thus obtained, we ought then, I say, to put a further question: whose special favour among the gods shall we seek to secure with a view to the happier execution of these measures? And in accordance with that answer, let us offer a sacrifice of happy omen to the deities so named, and commence the work; since if these transactions be so carried out with the will of God, have we not the right to prognosticate some further advance in the path of political progress for this whole state?

HSBC's executives saw an emerging class of global rich as the bank's path to prosperity. The superwealthy were increasingly stateless. They banked in Geneva. Lived in London and New York. Shopped in Paris and Milan. And they held their assets through offshore companies registered in places like the British Virgin Islands. HSBC executives were reading the telltale signs of a new age of inequality, even if they didn't recognize it as such. Governments were retreating from providing their citizens pension and health organizations, and HSBC strategy report observed. The stateless rich balked at paying taxes in their home countries, to which they felt little allegiance. It made sense to them to base their operations inside tax havens and to bank in Switzerland, where discretion was woven into the country's DNA. These trends represented an opportunity for the wealth management industry.

you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it. The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands. My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job.

Early on as news of the sextuple execution in Fort Smith spread, rooted itself in the umber soil of the western Indian Nations, and grew inthe the solid stalk of legend, the men whom Marshal Fagan appointed to swell the judge's standing army abanddonded the practice of introducing themselves as deputy U.S. marshals. Instead, when they entered the quarters of local law enforcement officers and tribal policemen to show their warrants, they said: "We ride for Parker." Sometimes, in deference to rugged country or to cover ground, they broke up and rode in pairs or singles, but as the majority of the casualties they would suffer occurred on these occasions, they formed ragged escorts around stout little wagons built of elm, with canvas sheets to protect the passengers from rain and sun for trial and execution. With these they entered the settlements well behind their reputations. The deputies used Winchesters to pry a path between rubbernecks pressing in to see what new animals the circus had brought. Inside, accused felons, rounded up like stray dogs, rode in manacles on the sideboards and decks. At any given time-so went the rumor-one fourth of the worst element in the Nations was at large, one fourth was in the Fort Smith jail, and one fourth was on its way there in the 'tumbleweed wagons.' "That's three-fourths," said tenderheels "What about the rest?' "That fourth rides for Parker.

By habitus, I mean dispositions that inhere and mold the deepest, subtlest, intricate structures of personhood, are constituted and emergent in the most elusive folds and lineaments of consciousness, and are articulated in lastingly resilient, enduring textual tapestries of experience, orientations, desires. The range of habitus is deep and broad: habitus forms the long arc of evolutionary developments and arrangements of the body in action and at rest, posture, gait, stance, and gesture; it is the silent teacher of the phonemic alphabet, determining subtle distinctions of timbre and tone, accents and intonations in voice articulations; it is the subcutaneous, ingrained dynamic inhering in daily competencies, executed flawlessly and yet seemingly unconsciously, such as balancing huge loads the size of a person’s body weight on the head as Kikuyu women often do, or walking fearlessly on narrow glacial paths through plunging cliffs as the Sherpas do, or weaving in and out of traffic while engaged in deep conversations on a cell phone as Californians do. Habitus describes the imbrication of structure and culture in desire. It is what defines subtle distinctions of taste, those almost ineffable differences of sweetness, succulence, spiciness, and bitterness in food and drink; the raging fetishes and unbidden cravings that shadow sexuality; the fickle difference between scents that intoxicate or trigger upheavals of wretching. Habitus, then, is “human nature” understood as the deep penetration of sociality with biology in such a manner that it is the motor of self, of choice, of vocation.

And the life of the natives consists of work; of starvation, cold, and cunning. This work, for those unable to push others out of the way and set themselves up in a soft spot, is that selfsame general work which raises socialism up out of the earth, and drives us down into the earth ... During the war years, on war rations, the camp inmates called the three weeks at logging 'dry execution.' You come to hate this forest, this beauty of the earth, whose praises have been sung in verse and prose ... As for our cursed Archipelago, it was eternally covered with snow and the blizzards eternally raged over it ... [To] distinguish between the nuances of the various paths to death ... sometimes called scurvy, sometimes pellagra, sometimes alimentary dystrophy ... How the last-leggers, jealously watching their competitors ... stand duty at the kitchen porch waiting for them to bring out the slops in the dishwater. How they throw themselves on it, and fight with one another, seeking a fish head, a bone, vegetable parings. And how one last-legger dies, killed in that scrimmage. In our glorious fatherland ...the most important and boldest books are never read by contemporaries ... And thus it is that I am writing this book solely from a sense of obligation - because too many stories and recollections have accumulated in my hands and I cannot allow them to perish. I do not expect to see it in print anywhere with my own eyes; and I have little hope that those who managed to drag their bones out of the Archipelago will ever read it; and I do not at all believe that it will explain the truth of our history in time for anything to be corrected ...

A gang of roving bandits who terrorized the backcountry of North Carolina in the mid-1700s captured seventeen-year-old Joseph Cook and threatened to murder him if he did not join their band. After Joseph explained that he was a Quaker and that his conscience would not allow him to kill another person, the ruffians began making plans to shoot him. While they were discussing his execution, Mary Herbert, a young Quaker woman about Joseph's age, suddenly appeared in their midst. She demanded that they let Joseph go and boldly stated that they could not have him because Joseph belonged to her. When the startled bandits refused her, she surprised them by grabbing Joseph and carrying him away in her arms. The captain of the bandits, presumably amused and certain that she could not carry him very far, shouted after her, “When you put him down we will start shooting.” Mary, empowered by love, found the strength to carry Joseph well beyond the range of their guns. Quaker journals from that period reveal that “two years later Mary established a legal claim to Joseph by marrying him.”16 There is love locked in our hearts waiting to empower us with strength beyond our imagining. The power to overcome evil by witnessing to love lies within us all, waiting to be released. Yet most of us keep this transforming power locked away, and we die having never dared to use it. Now is the time to listen within and unlock the transforming power of our love. If we dare to listen deeply, we hear love calling, inviting us to plain living, to “do no harm,” and to respect, love, and serve one another. Hope is whispering to us from the future, calling us each by name, beseeching us to open our hearts because only then will the world be transformed by what Love is waiting to do.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.

On defense, blitzscaling lets you set a pace that keeps your competitors gasping simply to keep up, affording them little time and space to counterattack. Because they’re focused on responding to your moves, which can often take them by surprise and force them to play catch-up, they don’t have as much time available to develop and execute differentiated strategies that might threaten your position. Blitzscaling helps you determine the playing field to your great advantage.

Consider the case of two very similar companies, Twitter and Tumblr. Both had brilliant, product-oriented founders in Evan “Ev” Williams and David Karp. Both were hot social media start-ups. Both grew at a remarkable rate after establishing product/ market fit. Both had a major impact on popular culture. Yet Twitter went public and achieved a market capitalization that peaked at nearly $ 37 billion, while Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo!—another start-up that used blitzscaling to become a scale-up, only to decline and fade away—for “only” $ 1 billion. Was this dumb luck on Twitter’s side? Perhaps. Luck always plays a larger role than founders, investors, and the media would like to admit. But a major difference was that Twitter could draw on numerous networks for advice and help that Tumblr could not. For example, Twitter was able to bring in Dick Costolo, a savvy executive with prior scaling experience at Google. In contrast, even though Tumblr was arguably the most prominent start-up in its New York City ecosystem, it couldn’t easily draw upon a pool of local talent who had experience dealing with rapid growth. According to Greylock’s John Lilly, for every executive role that Tumblr needed to fill, there were less than a handful of candidates in all of New York City.

This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.

I am fond of pointing out to entrepreneurs and executives that “in theory, you don’t need practice.” What I mean is that no matter how brilliant your business model and growth strategy, you won’t be able to build a real-world (i.e., non-theoretical) blockbuster company without a lot of practice. But that problem is magnified when you’re trying to blitzscale. The kind of growth involved in blitzscaling typically means major human resources challenges. Tripling the number of employees each year isn’t uncommon for a blitzscaling company. This requires a radically different approach to management than that of a typical growth company, which would be happy to grow 15 percent per year and can take time finding a few perfect hires and obsessing about corporate culture. As we will discuss in more detail later in the book, companies that blitzscale have to rapidly navigate a set of key transitions as their organizations grow, and have to embrace counterintuitive rules like hiring “good enough” people, launching flawed and imperfect products, letting fires burn, and ignoring angry customers. Over the course of this book, we’ll see how business model, growth strategy, and management innovation work together to form the high-risk, high-reward process of blitzscaling.

Harvard Business School professor and author Clay Christensen believes that you need to focus on the concept of the “job-to-be-done”; that is, when a customer buys a product, she is “hiring” it to do a particular job. Then there’s Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who said simply, “Build a product people love. Hire amazing people. What else is there to do? Everything else is fake work.” As Andrea Ovans aptly put it in her January 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is a Business Model?”, it’s enough to make your head swim! For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the basic definition: a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products. What sets companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook apart, even from other successful high-tech companies, is that they have consistently been able to design and execute business models with characteristics that allow them to quickly achieve massive scale and sustainable competitive advantage. Of course, there isn’t a single perfect business model that works for every company, and trying to find one is a waste of time. But most great business models have certain characteristics in common. If you want to find your best business model, you should try to design one that maximizes four key growth factors and minimizes two key growth limiters.

So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012.

the question of why some individuals learn motor skills faster than others; perhaps they have a better system of reflexes. More important, perhaps the motor deficits that accompany various movement disorders, such as stroke and cerebellar ataxia, are in part caused by patients’ inability to execute appropriate corrections to their movements, thus depriving their brains of an extremely knowledgeable teacher. This research suggests that encouraging patients to make mistakes while moving and reinforcing patient-driven feedback corrections to their movement errors may be one path toward neurorehabilitation. In other words, as neuroscientists, we hope that the fundamental insights we make concerning the brain will be translated into methods for improving human life.

The question that has puzzled Kremlin rulers since 1953 is how to perpetuate the house Stalin built without acquiring Stalin’s evil reputation. Unwilling to forfeit their control over Russian society, and unable to fully appreciate the devilish efficacy of arresting and executing millions arbitrarily, the Soviet ruling class charted a middle path that would pacify the West without losing the essential components of empire. This middle path, which brings us to Vladimir Putin, combines low profile red-brown totalitarianism with lip service to democracy and free markets. It is a case of power retained. Instead of genuine democracy, Russia is guided by secret totalitarian structures that govern through fictitious political fronts. In essence, there has been no capitalism in Russia since 1991. There has been no democracy. It was all an elaborate KGB hoax. The mask that hides the totalitarian face of Russia isn’t perfect. It has fooled the experts and pundits only because they wanted to be fooled. The inhumanity of Stalin’s regime was so great, its injustice so mind numbing, that good people don’t want to believe that Stalin’s system was and is a work in progress. We don’t want to admit that Stalin’s murder machine is undergoing renovation, that we ourselves may be included among its next victims. Such an admission would turn our world upside down, and such a turning is not at all desirable – especially when we consider that Stalin saw Hitler as “the icebreaker” of the Revolution. This leads us to the unpleasant possibility that Putin may see Osama bin Laden as an “icebreaker” as well.

Ideas lead to innovations that fuel the economies of the world, and they prevent our lives from becoming repetitive and stagnant. They are the cranes that pull us out of well-worn ruts and put us on a path toward progress. Without creativity we are not just condemned to a life of repetition, but to a life that slips backward. In fact, the biggest failures of our lives are not those of execution, but failures of imagination.

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Capability-based strategy-execution is the only path leading to a sustainable digital transformation.

What level of aggressiveness do you use on an intoxicated patron at a bar that is staggering around and wanting to fight you? What level of aggressiveness do you use on a gang of thugs that have jumped you in a parking lot? I add these two extremes because you are more likely to face one of these examples than find yourself in a life-or-death struggle in a trench on the front lines of a battlefield. Do you understand the Force Continuum that is taught to Law Enforcement Officers? I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with it. Besides being an excellent mental tool to use when faced with potentially violent encounters, it could be invaluable if you ever have to justify your actions to law enforcement or before a judge. The techniques demonstrated in this book can be very serious when executed. You should have a solid understanding of the law, levels of force needed to mitigate a violent encounter, and most importantly, the moral and ethical foundation of a true warrior. A warrior that has a high level of self-confidence, but isn’t arrogant. One that trains their body and their mind for that moment that they might find themselves in a sudden violent encounter. Warriors understand when to hold back the level of their aggression, and likewise, they understand when to unleash it in all its ruthless darkness. Few in today’s society walk the true path of a warrior.

Following up the butt strike, your weapon is now at your left shoulder, held in rifle grip with the right hand palm-down at the handle of the weapon and the left hand palm-up maybe one third to one half the distance up the stick. To execute the rap, bring the right hand in toward the right hip while the left hand pushes the barrel end outward into the opponent's face. The weapon retraces the path it originally took from middle guard to the left shoulder, only in reverse. In practice you will find that the left elbow acts like a shock absorber, causing the end of the stick to snap back. Redirect this rebound up to your right shoulder, while letting your left hand slide down to bat grip. Follow through with an overight strike. Practice these three moves in sequence: underight butt, overleft rap, overight strike from bat grip. Your weapon will trace a 'V,' moving from one shoulder to another. Slam I have also seen this technique referred to as a “bar strike” because you are striking with the portion of the stick between the hands, which is like a bar. The slam is typically performed with the hands palm down in staff grip, equidistant from the ends, and thrown so that the stick is horizontal. Realize, though, that the slam can be thrown with multiple grips in multiple orientations. From the middle guard, throw the stick forward and diagonally, parallel to your adversary, striking him in the chest. Don't just shove the opponent, but aim for an explosive strike that knocks him back on impact. If the attacker crouches and lunges in to tackle, jam the portion of the stick between your hands into the juncture of the opponent's right shoulder and neck.

What level of aggressiveness do you use on an intoxicated patron at a bar that is staggering around and wanting to fight you? What level of aggressiveness do you use on a gang of thugs that have jumped you in a parking lot? I add these two extremes because you are more likely to face one of these examples than find yourself in a life-or-death struggle in a trench on the front lines of a battlefield. Do you understand the Force Continuum that is taught to Law Enforcement Officers? I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with it. Besides being an excellent mental tool to use when faced with potentially violent encounters, it could be invaluable if you ever have to justify your actions to law enforcement or before a judge. The techniques demonstrated in this book can be very serious when executed. You should have a solid understanding of the law, levels of force needed to mitigate a violent encounter, and most importantly, the moral and ethical foundation of a true warrior. A warrior that has a high level of self-confidence, but isn’t arrogant. One that trains their body and their mind for that moment that they might find themselves in a sudden violent encounter. Warriors understand when to hold back the level of their aggression, and likewise, they understand when to unleash it in all its ruthless darkness. Few in today’s society walk the true path of a warrior. Most modern warriors are in special operations in the military and within the intelligence community. Others work as overseas contractors. There are some that work in various government agencies, but on the most part average civilians will never be in the role of a true warrior. Can any of us still be thrust into a life-or-death encounter with only our four limbs and, most importantly, our head to survive the situation? Yes, but honestly the odds of being in that kind of situation are extremely low. Given the gravity of such a situation, we should all still train ourselves to be able to increase our chance of surviving. The segment of the population that doesn’t train and believes that this type of thing will never happen to them, or their loved ones, falls under the category of those to be protected. Then again, you, as an individual, have the right to turn a blind eye, though morally and ethically wrong to a warrior, in such a situation and let natural selection take its course. I couldn’t do that and I’m sure the vast majority of you feel the same way. By examining ourselves and determining that we would not stand by idly while others were attacked, adds additional responsibility and purpose.

Toward the end of 1508, when most of the rooms were already frescoed, Bramante brought in a new talent, Raphael Sanzio, to execute the library. When Julius had eyes on his painting in the Stanza della Segnatura, he fired the painters who had nearly finished the new decorations for his private quarters and ordered Raphael to redo their works as he saw fit. The paintings that had so stunned Julius is today called The School of Athens. In it, Raphael created a visual anthology of classical philosophy that included many recognizable portraits in the crowd of erudites. We see his self-portrait as a golden-haired youth of extraordinary beauty, Bramante as Euclid holding class in geometry, Leonardo as Plato exhorting Aristotle to lift his gaze upward. Michelangelo’s portrait is the most like him, down to his negligent dress. He appears in the center of the foreground as Heraclitus, the melancholy philosopher, slumped over a makeshift table, alone in his thoughts.

the lesson I should have drawn is there may be more than one bug here and I should have looked harder the first time. But another lesson is that if a bug is thought to be rare, then looking at rarely executed paths may be fruitful. And a third thing is, having good documentation about what the algorithm is trying to do, namely a reference back to Knuth, was just great.

Historically, as unjust laws have brought death, oppression, and injustice, far too many Christians have acquiesced to a patriotic doctrine of unquestioning allegiance to law and order. I raise this point in part because it is so easy to forget that if Mary and Joseph had blindly followed the law, Jesus would have been executed at birth—as would have Moses. Jesus embodied God’s heart for restoration. Jesus came to save, redeem, and restore those who are separated from God and their community because of their sin. But Jesus also came to remove the stones of judgment from the hands of religious people who impede the path of restoration for those who have stumbled along the way.

The destiny is ready but the path and the means to get there is yet to be negotiated, strategized and executed upon.

I sit there for a good twenty minutes, stewing in my own depression. Is this it for me? I make one mistake and my life is over. How is that fair? How is any of this fair? There’s a lot of things I deserve, but jail or execution isn’t one of them. I guess this is the life I chose. This is the path I decided to walk down. This is it.

But the opposite of libertarian hyperindividualism is not necessarily the Red Army kicking in the door of your father’s drugstore. It could also be a sense of social solidarity, an ethic of “We’re all in this together.” As Pope Francis said, after a closed-door meeting with oil company executives about climate change in 2018, “Decisive progress on this path cannot be made without an increased awareness that all of us are part of one human family, united by bands of fraternity and solidarity.

The belief, in the West, that same-sex intimacy necessarily involves sexual desire gained traction a couple of centuries ago. A pamphlet titled Satan’s Harvest Home, published in 1749 in London, claimed that men who greeted each other with a kiss—at that point, still a ubiquitous greeting—were set on the path to Sodom. Disgust toward sodomy in eighteenth-century England swelled, and authorities rounded up accused sodomites in mass arrests and executions. With the specter of sex now hanging over men’s physical interactions, it made sense for them to withdraw from one another. By the late 1780s in England, kissing had been replaced by the handshake.

I was standing in a parking lot, the roof above me cracking and splitting apart, the place about to collapse. The roar of a crowd sounded from beyond the building and I ran to a barred window, looking outside where the Lunar Brotherhood were rioting. Ryder was being dragged through them and I fought with the bars to try and get out, my magic failing me as I bellowed his name. They stabbed him, shouting traitor as they made him bleed, dragging him to a huge stone statue of a Centaur rearing up and pointing to the stars. They wound a vine over its outstretched arm and strung Ryder up and the mob worked to rip him to pieces in a bloody execution. “No!” I cried, panic consuming me as I sought out other paths, ways to avoid this fate, but they were closing in, so many of them curving back onto this one. “How do I save him?” I demanded of the stars as I tried to find a way out. “This day will come,” they whispered inside my head. “How do I stop it?” I begged. “You cannot,” they answered. “Please, I’ll do anything,” I said in desperation. “You will see this come to pass, Gabriel Nox, son of fate,” they answered. “I can’t, I won’t let it happen,” I insisted as my heart began to crack in my chest. “How can I make sure he doesn’t die?” “You ask the wrong questions,” they answered, their voices seeming to slip away into the distance. “What’s the right question?” I begged, feeling them leaving me behind with the weight of this unthinkable destiny laid out before me. They disappeared from my mind like a dying wind and my anxiety flared. “How do I save him?” I cried, but they were gone and I stood alone in an endless expanse of white, too bright to see anything beyond it. I squinted against the light, struggling to focus and suddenly the world shifted. I stood at the base of a dark mountain in Alestria and up ahead of me was a hooded figure leading the Black Card behind them up a rocky path. I could sense the very time and date this would happen. It was one week away on the full moon. King was going to hold a ritual larger than they ever had before. And that would be our chance to strike. But if we failed, I didn’t hold out much hope for the people of Solaria.

It was almost a pity he was not stupid enough to do something that would get him executed.

Initially, he was entranced by the professional investing industry that was blossoming as he entered adulthood. At the time of writing the Financial Analysts Journal article, Bogle was a young hotshot executive of Wellington, one of the oldest and largest mutual fund managers in America. But an odd combination of disaster and serendipity in the mid-1970s set him on the path to upending the industry he once venerated. “There’s nobody more religious than a convert,” observes Jim Riepe, one of Bogle’s closest colleagues in the founding of Vanguard, as a way of explaining the remarkable metamorphosis.

Some people—like the engineers and executives of high-tech corporations—are way ahead of politicians and voters and are better informed than most of us about the development of AI, cryptocurrencies, social credits, and the like. Unfortunately, most of them don’t use their knowledge to help regulate the explosive potential of the new technologies. Instead, they use it to make billions of dollars—or to accumulate petabits of information. There are exceptions, like Audrey Tang. She was a leading hacker and software engineer who in 2014 joined the Sunflower Student Movement, which protested against government policies in Taiwan. The Taiwanese cabinet was so impressed by her skills that Tang was eventually invited to join the government as its minister of digital affairs. In that position, she helped make the government’s work more transparent to citizens. She was also credited with using digital tools to help Taiwan successfully contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet Tang’s political commitment and career path are not the norm. For every computer-science graduate who wants to be the next Audrey Tang, there are probably many more who want to be the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Musk and build a multibillion-dollar corporation rather than become an elected public servant. This leads to a dangerous information asymmetry. The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it.

Vested interests also reinforce the status quo. High-level executives at Fortune 500 companies shun innovation because their compensation is tied to short-term quarterly outcomes that may be temporarily disrupted by forging a new path. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

It should probably neither surprise nor particularly disturb us, then, to discover that Christians of the late fourth century were not very inclined to agree with Symmachus that all religious paths led toward the same truth, given that one could walk so many of those paths quite successfully without ever turning aside to bind up the wounds of a suffering stranger, and without even pausing in alarm before unwanted babies left to be devoured by wild beasts, or before the atrocities of the arena, or before mass executions.

Two paths lie ahead of today’s CIOs. One leads to becoming a trusted senior executive leader of the enterprise; the other leads to a technical management, “just keep the lights on and do it cheap” role.

The barrier standing between you and the life you are capable of living is a lack of consistent execution. Effective execution will set you free. It is the path to accomplish the things you desire.

Leadership and Culture” may seem like a vague or general catch-all phrase. Let me offer some questions to guide you down the path and to set the stage for upcoming chapters on this important first piece of the framework. What does it feel like to be part of your company’s sales team? Is it a high-performance culture? Why do you feel that way? Are team members laser-focused on goals and results? What’s the vibe in the sales department (whether it is local or based remotely)? What does accountability look like on this team? How often, how big, and how loud are victories celebrated? Is the manager leading the team or just reacting to circumstances? Are sales team meetings valuable? Do salespeople leave those meetings better equipped, envisioned, and energized, or drained and discouraged? Do members of the sales team feel supported, valued, and appreciated? Does the existing compensation plan make sense and does it drive the desired behaviors and results? In what ways is the manager putting his or her fingerprints on the team? How much of the sales leader’s time is devoted to non-sales activities and executive and administrative burdens? What’s the level of intensity, passion, and heart-engagement of team members? I don’t believe that anyone would doubt that we can create significant lift in a sales organization by improving the answers to these questions.

On the flip side, the following figure shows the components and their sequence of executions that form a read path: Cassandra read path

They were wary of each other at first, but in time formed a tight alliance that lasted twenty years until it came unstuck over the execution of Julia Gillard.

The meeting started well enough. Balsillie explained how BlackBerry could be synchronized with a user’s desktop computer calendar and contacts. You just have to put the device in this cradle, he said, pointing to a prototype. Normally, the cradle would have had a cable connecting it to the computer, but the cord was missing from the demonstration. One Intel executive, Sean Maloney, VP of worldwide sales, was confused. “What are you saying, how does it do that?” Maloney asked. Klimstra saw why the Intel executive was puzzled. He doesn’t realize there’s supposed to be a cable connecting the cradle to the computer, he thought. Balsillie appeared stumped too, saying nothing. To Klimstra, the lengthy silence that followed was agonizing. This must be my cue, he thought. Clearing his throat, Klimstra piped up: “That cradle is just a mock-up.” Maloney nodded as Klimstra explained it would normally have a cable attached. Balsillie turned to Klimstra. “Eric,” he said, growing cold with fury. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever”—Klimstra’s stomach twisted with each “ever”—“interrupt me in a meeting again.” After an awkward silence, Balsillie continued the presentation. As they filed out after the meeting, Maloney’s eyes met Klimstra’s. The young evangelist could read the look: “Kid, I’m sorry if I got you fired.” Outside, Balsillie was unapologetic. “Never interrupt me when I’m in the zone,” he said. “I was very specific in directing them in a certain way and I didn’t want to go down any other path.” It wasn’t that Klimstra had said anything wrong. What bothered Balsillie was that he had said anything at all. “He could have been about to take us over a cliff” by inadvertently blurting out a corporate secret as he explained how the system worked, Balsillie says of his strict stick-to-the-script rule.

The following figure depicts the components and their sequence of executions that form a write path: Cassandra write path

When God binds Himself to being our God, then at the same time He binds Himself to be the God of our seed. With His grace He follows the line of the generations. He executes election along the route and pathway of the covenant. As Father of all mercies He walks the path that He Himself, as Father of everything, has drawn.

To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society—here the retirees—has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don’t see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. What is worse, this system is called “incentive-based” and supposed to correspond to capitalism. Supposedly managers’ interests are aligned with those of the shareholders. What incentive? There is upside and no downside, no disincentive at all.

Here was a head of state ordering the execution of the private citizens of foreign countries for writing and publishing a work of fiction. A grotesque regard for the forms of legality had accompanied previous outbreaks of state terrorism. Even Stalin forced his victims to confess at show trials so that when he murdered them, he did so with a kangaroo court’s approval. No such concern with keeping up appearances inhibited Khomeini. On 14 February 1989, he said that the faithful must kill Rushdie and his publishers and ‘execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.’ Just in case zealous assassins doubted that they would receive eternal life in paradise along with the services of seventy-two virgins, an Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.

Leaders in an execution culture design strategies that are more road maps than rigid paths

I hear rumbling somewhere ahead of us--the sound of a crowd. The next hallway is packed with Dauntless traitors, tall and short, young and old, armed and unarmed. They all wear the blue armband of betrayal. “Hey!” Peter shouts. “Clear a path!” The Dauntless traitors closest to us hear him, and press against the walls to make way for us. The other Dauntless traitors follow suit soon after, and everyone is quiet. Peter steps back to let me go ahead of him. I know the way from here. I don’t know where the pounding starts, but someone drums their fists against the wall, and someone else joins in, and I walk down the aisle between solemn-but-raucous Dauntless traitors, their hands in motion at their sides. The pounding is so fast my heart races to keep up with it. Some of the Dauntless traitors incline their heads to me--I’m not sure why. It doesn’t matter. I reach the end of the hallway and open the door to my execution chamber. I open it. Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room.

verybody has an imagination. There’s the construction worker who can close his eyes and imagine a Hawaiian vacation. There’s the corporate executive with visions of that next big promotion. There’s the stay-at-home mother and her perfectly built “cabana boy” who will sweep her off her feet. For a small group of us, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to use our imaginations to make a living.

Islam means “submission.”1 The faith teaches that Muslims must submit to the will of Allah2 and prepare themselves for the final judgment in order to be able to enter paradise.3 Muslims believe that Allah revealed his will through Sharia, which literally means “path” but is generally translated as “Islamic law.”4 Unlike the traditional Western legal system, which is limited to basic civil and criminal elements, Sharia covers everything from religious rituals and private hygiene to principles of conducting business, criminal punishments, and more. Sharia prescribes, for example, how many times a Muslim must pray, how husbands should treat their wives, and what punishments are to be given for different crimes. It mandates flogging for consuming alcohol,5 stoning adulterers to death,6 cutting off a thief’s limbs,7 and executing apostates and blasphemers.8 Many Muslims around the world do not adhere to the jihadist ideology of terrorists. Most Muslims are moderate, peaceful people who, while following their religious traditions and rituals—attending mosques for worship, fasting, witnessing to others—reasonably coexist with followers of other religions. They do not impose their beliefs on others. They have non-Muslim friends, neighbors, and coworkers with whom they socialize on a daily basis. To these Muslims, Islam is a religion of peace. A small but increasingly significant segment of Muslims (some estimate its size as between 10 and 20 percent),9 however, believe in the supremacy of Islam and Sharia law over any other religion or law and feel obligated to force such beliefs on everybody. This

Buyer Legends is a business process that uses storytelling techniques to map the critical paths a prospective buyer might follow on his journey to becoming a buyer. This process aligns strategy to brand story to the buyer’s actual experience on their customer journey. These easy-to-tell stories reveal the opportunities and gaps in the customer’s experience versus the current marketing & sales process. These legends communicate the brand’s story intent and critical touch point responsibilities within every level of an organization, from the boardroom to the stockroom. Buyer Legends reconcile the creative process to data analysis; aligning metrics with previously hard-to-measure marketing, sales, and customer service processes. The first result is improved execution, communications, and testing. The second result is a big boost to the bottom line.

Those who are doggedly attached to the idea they began with may well execute on that idea. And do it well and fast. But along the way, they often miss so many unanticipated possibilities, options, alternatives, and paths that would’ve taken them away from that linear focus on executing on the vision, and sent them back into a place of creative dissidence and uncertainty, but also very likely yielded something orders of magnitude better.

Many authors also attacked the widespread corruption among lawyers. In general, justice was recognized as being so unjust that, as Montaigne complained, ordinary people avoided it rather than seeking it out. He cited a local incident in which a group of peasants found a man lying stabbed and bleeding on a path. He begged them to give him water and help him to his feet, but they ran off, not daring to touch him in case they were held responsible for the attack. Montaigne had the job of talking to them after they were tracked down. “What could I say to them?” he wrote. They were right to be afraid. In another case he mentions, a gang of killers confessed to a murder for which someone had already been tried and was about to be executed. Surely this ought to mean a stay of execution? No, decided the court: that would set a dangerous precedent for overturning judgments.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.

Executive ability,” he observed on another occasion, “is nothing more or less than letting the other fellow do the work for you.

The Need for Justice and the Problem of Evil The search for justice runs through all storytelling. We watch some nefarious villain executing his evil ploy and we hang on the edge of our seats hoping our hero will be victorious. There’s something fundamental in the human spirit that wants to see good triumph. This desire for justice is what attracts us to the adventure quest, like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. There, Frodo Baggins is given a ring that holds the power of the evil Sauron, who seeks to wield it and rule Middle Earth. Because he bears this ring, Frodo assumes the dangerous responsibility of finding the path to destroy it. Frodo never asked for this assignment; circumstances thrust it upon him. Yet, he knows the quest is vital even if he may lose his life in the process. In one poignant scene, Frodo is feeling the weight of his choice and laments to Gandalf about the evil Gollum, who is threatening their quest: Frodo: It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill him when he had the chance! Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many. Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you also were meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought. In Frodo’s complaint, we see a particular instance of the problem of evil. You may have heard someone complain about how a loving God could allow so much evil in the world. Frodo believes the world would be better if Gollum had been killed. It’s easy to make the charge that there’s too much evil in the world, but we don’t know how the story of this world plays out. However, fans know that Gandalf is right. Gollum’s existence does figure into the ultimate salvation of Middle Earth. Evil Gollum must exist in order for Frodo’s quest to succeed and a greater evil vanquished. The Roman executioner’s cruelty must also exist for the sacrifice of Jesus to succeed. It isn’t a contradiction to say God exists and is in control even if evil hasn’t been eliminated. We just haven’t gotten to the end of the story.

The sweet spot for your work should be where all three intersect. If you’re focusing solely on things you’re good at that bring you joy, you can get stuck galloping down paths that are detrimental to the needs of your company. If you’re doing things the company needs that bring you joy (but you’re not good at), then you’re dragging your company down. But if you’re stuck doing things the company needs that you’re good at (but don’t like), that leads to burnout. That’s exactly what I was doing. I hired an executive assistant who lightened that load for a bit. She helped streamline a few things and made appointments, but what I really needed was someone to whom I could delegate at another level. At the time, I felt like we couldn’t afford someone who wasn’t contributing to the bottom line of the company. In retrospect, this was one of the biggest mistakes I made while building the company. I should have hired someone who could come into the office and handle operations. Things like legal, payroll, HR, and facilities. Most of these were outsourced to external providers, and it was just a matter of interfacing with them. As I look back at my descent into burnout, one thing that could have saved me was having enough funding to hire someone to do the work that didn’t bring me joy. Or prioritizing spending money on hiring and delegating tasks that didn’t move the business forward but were contributing to my lack of satisfaction at work. I hope you’re not at a place where the next section is helpful to you. I hope that you’re smarter than I was and are putting measures into place to keep yourself from burning out like I did. As Jason said in his talk: “The right question is what should you be doing differently now […] in order to build a company that’s more healthy and prosperous, and also avoid this balloon payment of emotional toil at the end.

Do you know an executive leader in your industry who you can call on to help you navigae a problem? Someone at the midlevel who can tell you about job openings? Someone at the junior level who can help you take the temperature of employees just starting out, or teach you what the newer members of the workforce are prioritizing in the office? Someone at the junior just starting out, or teach you what the newer members of the workforce are prioritizing in the office? I always say it's important for me to know someone in every decade of life. Eventually the 60 somethings will retire and the 20 something contacts will move up, before you know it, that junior level employee you knew back in the day is running her own company and thanks to years of building a relationship, you have in.

Organisations are scrambling, and they assume DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) won't bring in revenue, so they give it the smallest budget. Then they allocate what little DEI money they do have to programs and events concerning hiring rather than retention, professional development, education, or training. That might help bring in new entry-level employees of color, but if you don't dedicate resources to retention and development, how are you going to help advance these workers to executive positions? If you don't invest in progress, no one is going to suddenly work miracles.

If you aren't consistently executing your work at a high level, the rest of it doesn't matter. And this is especially true for minority, who are often the first on the chopping block when companies make cuts - last hired, first fired as the expression goes.

Jumping up and down with the cone between your feet. 2. Running with thoughts of ‘feet on pelvis’, etc. 3. Running after mobilising the feet joints from long foot edge to long foot edge. 4. Running after executing ‘I'm a Little Teapot’ several times to each side. 5. Running after executing ‘Is There Poo On My Shoe?’ several times to each side. 6. Running with feet landing either side of the lined-up cones. 7. Running with lateral bounds inside an exaggeratedly-wide channel of cones. 8. Running with lateral bounds and with the sense of the hips catching the travelling pelvis and throwing it back to centre.

Challenges. We must embrace challenges rather than avoid them. 2.Obstacles. We must persist through obstacles rather than give up. 3.Effort. We must see effort as a path to mastery rather than as a fruitless endeavor. 4.Criticism. We must learn from criticism rather than ignoring useful feedback. 5.Success of others. We must be inspired by the success of others rather than feeling threatened.

A gene segment has no more need of an imaginary mediation in order to reproduce than does an earthworm, any segment of which can reproduce autonomously as an entire worm. Any cell of an American chief executive officer likewise suffices to produce a new chief executive officer. Similarly, any portion of a hologram may become the matrix of a new complete hologram: each discrete portion of the original hologram contains all the information needed for reproduction (though a slight loss of definition may occur). This is how the totality is eliminated. If all information is contained in each of its parts, the whole loses its significance. This means the end of the body also, the end of that unique object which we call the body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be broken down into an accumulation of cells because it is an indivisible configuration - as witness the very fact that it is sexed. Paradoxically, cloning is destined to continue producing sexed beings indefinitely - clones must, of course, remain identical to their model - even as it turns sex itself into a useless function; not that sex was ever a function: on the contrary, it is what makes a body a body, something which transcends all that body's diverse functions. Sex (or death) is something that transcends the entirety of the information that can be collected concerning a given body. The genetic formula, by contrast, contains all such information, but cannot transcend it. It must therefore find its own autonomous path to reproduction, independently of sexuality and death.

The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.

Once the executive has earned the team’s trust and credibility, consider promoting him or her.

The next time you have a problem at your company, think about this: Is this simply a problem in execution, or was there a decision in the past, perhaps the distant past, that set us down the path where this operational problem was more likely to happen? Is the problem rooted in faulty bluework in the past?

Even those of us with good or average executive functioning skills can still be thrown off the path to our goals in a weak moment, especially when we are tired, hungry or overwhelmed, which explains cheating on diets, overspending and all sorts of other common human behavior attributed to willpower – or lack of it.

The world has often mourned Over the stories of two strangers So right for each other But who crossed paths At the wrong time They met at the junction And buried sweet dreams turned bitter A journey envisioned together Was then covered on separate lanes The price heavier than the crime But what is time If not a puppet in its Lord’s Hands Ticking seamlessly right Flawlessly accomplishing destiny’s plan Executing orders with precision, sublime Perhaps the strangers may meet at another turn Or maybe their paths diverged to never converge But looking back, the argument may hold little value Because in an attempt to find each other They found their Lord, The Gracious, The Kind.

A third way urges disputants to recognize the limits of their personal responsibility for the actions of others and to leave the execution of a judgment to God.

Having software shape the critical path of operational execution has substantial ramifications. Digital, AI-driven processes are more scalable than traditional processes.

In the case of the former, he tries to decentralize the process. At Amazon he created what he calls “multiple paths to yes.” In other organizations, he points out, a proposal can be killed by supervisors at many levels, and it needs to pass through all those gates in order to be approved. At Amazon, employees can shop their ideas around to any of the hundreds of executives who are empowered to get to yes.

There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise.

An accurate picture of the odds is important when you’re choosing a path. But once you’ve already made your choice, then you should switch into irrational optimism for the execution phase.

In many organizations, your ability to grow in your career will hit a ceiling unless you start managing people. All C-level executives lead teams. If your ambitions are to be a CEO or VP someday, you’re going to need to move on to the management track. There are also jobs where, beyond a certain skill level, the only path for growth is learning how to manage and coordinate the work of more and more people—for example, in customer support or retail sales

The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. This taxonomy is more focused on being useful than complete, but so far, I’ve been able to fit every Staff-plus engineer I’ve spoken to into one of these categories. Admittedly, some folks are easier to classify than others.

Alex heard a stirring in the Hall. Brian had arrived. They cleared a path for him, saluting with mighty cheers as their leader made his way to the stage up front. Alex met him there. Brian looked good. His eyes were alert and alive, soaking in these final sights before the end. Alex could tell there had been no tears. At this deeply emotional moment, Alex felt an urge to hug his friend, or at least shake his hand, but human touch was anathema. He saluted. “I’m glad you made it,” Alex said. “You didn’t think I’d change my mind, did you?” Brian replied. “Of course not. I knew you’d be here. You’re even early.” “I think it’s best to arrive early for one’s execution, don’t you?