Rare Senior Quotes

Sometimes we hear about churches having honor cultures, but they rarely seem to be cultures where everyone is honored. The power dynamics work in such a way that the honor flows uphill to the senior leaders. Honor seems to work much as it would in the world. The most visible receive the most glory; the most gifted, the most attention.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you’ve got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary. That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey. Fortunately for us we have just the man.

In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team. This group rarely includes all of the most senior people because some of them just won’t buy in, at least at first. But in the most successful cases, the coalition is always powerful—in terms of formal titles, information and expertise, reputations and relationships, and the capacity for leadership. Individuals alone, no matter how competent or charismatic, never have all the assets needed to overcome tradition and inertia except in very small organizations. Weak committees are usually even less effective.

Don’t run down your checklist. There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you’ve been doing. Sometimes this is appropriate, but it is rarely what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help.

You are a product to dragnet surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, Comcast and Verizon. Your ideas are rarely your own, rather you are little more than a pawn to their perception steering initiatives to get you to read, believe and buy what they put in front of you. The first step to breaking out of this faux reality matrix is to stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Comcast and Facebook.

Good reader, I was exactly the Church Youth Group Girl you think I was. Christian T-shirts and youth choir with a side of sanctimony. It pains me to admit this, but my class voted me “Most Inspirational” my senior year. I was a lot of fun, bless my heart. I grew up immersed in typical Christian culture: heavy emphasis on morality, fairly dogmatic, linear, and authoritative. Because my experience was so homogenous and my skill set included Flying Right, I found wild success within the paradigm. My interpretations were rarely challenged by diversity, suffering, or disparity. Since the bull’s-eye was good behavior (we called it “holiness”), I earned an A.

NO GRAPH IN THE world can do full justice to these unexpected moments. They’re sweet little bursts of grace, and they leave sense-memories on the skin (the smell of the child’s shampoo, the smoothness of his arms). That’s why we’re here, leading this life, isn’t it? To know this kind of enchantment? The question is why such moments, at least with small children, often feel so hard-won, so shatterable, and so fleeting, as if located between parentheses. After just a few minutes of this dreamy slow-dance with Abe, William does a face-plant and starts howling. Jessie sambas over and handles it with humor. This is the drill. I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.” Simply put, flow is a state of being in which we are so engrossed in the task at hand—so fortified by our own sense of agency, of mastery—that we lose all sense of our surroundings, as though time has stopped.

Bollywood's economic workings are more mysterious. It still exists in what was known as the informal and high-risk sector of the Indian economy. Banks rarely invest in Bollywood, where moneylenders are rampant, demanding up to 35 percent interest. The big corporate houses seem no less keen to stay away from filmmaking. A senior executive with the Tatas, one of India's prominent business families, told me, "We went into Bollywood, made one film, lost a lot of money, and got out of it fast," adding that "the place works in ways we couldn't begin to explain to our shareholders." Since only six or seven of the two hundred films made each year earn a profit, the industry has generated little capital of its own. The great studios of the early years of the industry are now defunct. It is outsiders- regular moneylenders, small and big businessmen, real estate people, and, sometimes, mafia dons- who continue to finance new films, and their turnover, given the losses, is rapid. Their motives are mixed: sex, glamour, money laundering, and, more optimistically, profit. They rarely have much to do with the desire to make original, or even competent, films.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.12 Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed, whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known. One of the most important roles of senior management during a venture’s early years is to learn from emergent sources what is working and what is not, and then to cycle that learning back into the process through the deliberate channel.

In my experience, historical analogy is the analytic method of choice for senior foreign policy makers trying to get a handle on world events unfolding in real time. When trying to understand a new problem, they rarely use or even read analyses informed by social science methods such as game theory, statistical data, or randomized control trials. And logically, these analogies are made to historical cases with which the individuals are most familiar. I watched this play out dozens of times during my five years in government, and it was particularly striking during our struggles to understand the Arab Spring, and especially events in Egypt in the winter of 2011.

International leaders in business, government, and nonprofit organizations whisper behind closed doors about the way visiting Americans live in their own bubbles without having much genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, much less the locals. One senior foreign policy advisor told Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, “When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can't take it in.”13 Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations, put it this way: “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without.”14

Harold lies in the darkened room with curtains drawn. It is one thirty in the afternoon and his lunch tray seems to almost sigh at the untouched food. His words are soft and not many. He listens, looking down, as you speak about concerned staff referring him to a counselling program – you are here to see if he is interested. “I’m fine,” he says, in a rare attempt to meet your eye, and it is clear to you that he is not. He is 88 years old and five months ago his right leg had to be amputated due to complications with diabetes. Immediately after, he was transferred to an aged care facility an hours drive from his wife Elizabeth, two years his senior, who could no long care for him at home. A month after that he was transferred to this facility; his wife can now more easily visit him. But, he tells you, he does not know why she bothers. “There’s no point,” he says, and you wonder if he is also referring to being alive.

In Walked Jim September 2013: Entering his first morning staff meeting as FBI director, Jim Comey loped to the head of the table, put down his briefing books, and lowered his six-foot-eight-inch, shirtsleeved self into a huge leather chair. He leaned the chair so far back on its hind legs that he lay practically flat, testing gravity. Then he sat up, stretched like a big cat, pushed the briefing books to the side, and said, as if he were talking to a friend, I don’t want to talk about these today. I’d rather talk about some other things first. He talked about how effective leaders immediately make their expectations clear and proceeded to do just that for us. Said he would expect us to love our jobs, expect us to take care of ourselves … I remember less of what he said than the easygoing way he spoke and the absolute clarity of his day-one priority: building relationships with each member of his senior team. Comey continually reminded the FBI leadership that strong relationships with one another were critical to the institution’s functioning. One day, after we reviewed the briefing books, he said, Okay, now I want to go around the room, and I want you all to say one thing about yourselves that no one else here knows about you. One hard-ass from the criminal division stunned the room to silence when he said, My wife and I, we really love Disney characters, and all our vacation time we spend in the Magic Kingdom. Another guy, formerly a member of the hostage-rescue team, who carefully tended his persona as a dead-eyed meathead—I thought his aesthetic tastes ran the gamut from YouTube videos of snipers in Afghanistan to YouTube videos of Bigfoot sightings—turned out to be an art lover. I really like the old masters, he said, but my favorite is abstract expressionism. This hokey parlor game had the effect Comey intended. It gave people an opportunity to be interesting and funny with colleagues in a way that most had rarely been before. Years later, I remember it like yesterday. That was Jim’s effect on almost everyone he worked with. I observed how he treated people. Tell me your story, he would say, then listen as if there were only the two of you in the whole world. You were, of course, being carefully assessed at the same time that you were being appreciated and accepted. He once told me that people’s responses to that opening helped him gauge their ability to communicate. Over the next few years I would sit in on hundreds of meetings with him. All kinds of individuals and organizations would come to Comey with their issues. No matter how hostile they were when they walked in the door, they would always walk out on a cloud of Comey goodness. Sometimes, after the door had closed, he would look at me and say, That was a mess. Jim has the same judgmental impulse that everyone has. He is complicated, with many different sides, and he is so good at showing his best side—which is better than most people’s—that his bad side, which is not as bad as most people’s, can seem more shocking on the rare moments when it flashes to the surface.

Compared to a conventional debt instrument, what makes securitization so attractive is the fact that the airline often retains the junior tranches. These become an asset on its balance sheet. Any discount associated with the low credit rating of these layers is more than offset by the discount on the purchase of the aircraft, thereby creating an immediate profit and cash inflow on delivery of the aircraft. Such are the wonders of modern financial alchemy. Under good, even normal, business conditions, the airline makes lease payments to the securitization vehicle. But in a recession or a bankruptcy filing, when payments are suspended, the owners of the senior strata are able to seize the collateral. The junior participants in the securitization have no rights, and any such assets on the airline’s balance sheet must be written down to zero, further increasing the airline’s losses. By this clever piece of financial engineering, the airline gets shiny new planes for an extremely low cost of funds–recently as low as 6 per cent–while equity shareholders carry nearly all of the business risk. That an industry which has rarely earned an acceptable return on capital should have access to such cheap capital is quite astonishing.

The fracas was frequently portrayed in the media as two world-famous Harvard professors brought low by a graduate student from a lesser-known, unorthodox department. This is largely hyperbole. But the clash did illustrate an import aspect of economics—something that the profession shares with other sciences: Ultimately, what determines the standing of a piece of research is not the affiliation, status, or network of the author; it is how well it stacks up to the research criteria of the profession itself. The authority of the work derives from its internal properties—how well it is put together, how convincing the evidence is—not from the identity, connections, or ideology of the researcher. And because these standards are shared within the profession, anyone can point to shoddy work and say it is shoddy.¶¶ This may not seem particularly impressive, unless you consider how unusual it is compared to many other social sciences or much of the humanities.## It would be truly rare in those other fields for a graduate student to get much mileage challenging a senior scholar’s work, as happens with some frequency in economics. But because models enable the highlighting of error, in economics anyone can do it.

Around a hundred Texans faced 3,000 Mexican Government troops. According to the account that long filled patriotic Americans’ schoolbooks, Crockett died a hero defiantly swinging the butt of his rifle, Old Betsy, at oncoming Mexicans after running out of ammunition. A Different Story Surfaces In 1975, a previously untranslated diary written by José Enrique de la Peña, senior Mexican officer at the battle, revealed that Crockett and six other survivors had actually surrendered. According to this account, they were executed shortly afterwards. The revelation did not come without controversy. Historians still dispute whether the diary is genuine, pointing to the unclear circumstances of its emergence in the mid-1950s in Mexico, just at the height of Disney’s fictionalisation of Crockett’s story across the border in the United States. Advocates cite a supporting pamphlet that was lodged in the archives of Yale University long before the Crockett fad began, which they suggest point to the diary being genuine. A crude Mexican attempt at Party pooping? Or bursting the bubble of a fabled tale? The truth may never be known, but the episode once more demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s observation of the truth being rarely pure and never simple.

Interestingly, [Kevin] Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound challenge to economic growth. “This position is shared by many senior scientists and economists advising government,” Anderson reports. In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.” Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.

In addition to the external barriers erected by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives - the messages that say it's wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet. Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions. This is not a list of things other women have done. I have made every mistake on this list. At times, I still do. My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Others have argued that women can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. We will march into our bosses' offices and demand what we need, including pregnancy parking. Or better yet, we'll become bosses and make sure all women have what they need. The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right. So rather than engage in philosophical arguments over which comes first, let's agree to wage battles on both fronts. They are equally important. I am encouraging women to address the chicken, but I fully support those who are focusing on the egg. Internal obstacles are rarely discussed and often underplayed. Throughout my life, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. I rarely heard anything, however, about the ways I might hold myself back. These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.

from senior management that my customer would not get scalped, then everyone could win. Salomon would make a lot of money. My customer would make a little money (which, for a customer, was grand). And I would be a hero. If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer’s pocket was a dollar

In any hierarchical organization, the playing field is rarely level. The senior leaders stand on the high side of the field and ideas and policies roll easily down to the lower side. Policies—established to create order—often unintentionally keep people from thinking. At

Aside from the waste, fraud has a terribly demoralising effect on scientists. As we’ve seen, one reason that so many frauds manage to infiltrate the literature is that, in general, scientists are open-minded and trusting. The norm for peer reviewers is to be sceptical of how results are interpreted, but the thought that the data are fake usually couldn’t be further from their minds. The sheer prevalence of fraud, though, means that we all need to add a depressing option to our repertoire of reactions to questionable-looking papers: someone might be lying to us. Nor is it just other people’s papers that require this extra vigilance: fraud can happen on any scientist’s own doorstep. Because papers are rarely authored by lone researchers, a fraudulent co-author can sometimes tarnish the reputation of entire teams of innocent colleagues. In many cases the perpetrator is a junior lab member who drags their senior co-authors’ names through the mud, as in the case of Michael LaCour’s fake gay-marriage canvassing study. Sometimes it goes the other way, with established scientists recklessly jeopardising the careers of their subordinates (the report into Diederik Stapel’s fraud noted, for example, that no fewer than ten of his students’ PhD theses were reliant on his faked data). And we already saw the ultimate cost of reputational damage in the case of Yoshiki Sasai, who took his own life after finding himself involved in the STAP stem-cell scandal.

The head of one of the large management consulting firms always starts an assignment with a new client by spending a few days visiting the senior executives of the client organization one by one. After he has chatted with them about the assignment and the client organization, its history and its people, he asks (though rarely, of course, in these words): “And what do you do that justifies your being on the payroll?” The great majority, he reports, answer: “I run the accounting department,” or “I am in charge of the sales force.” Indeed, not uncommonly the answer is, “I have 850 people working under me.” Only a few say, “It’s my job to give our managers the information they need to make the right decisions,” or “I am responsible for finding out what products the customer will want tomorrow,” or “I have to think through and prepare the decisions the president will have to face tomorrow.” The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

his or her own senior leaders. As we wrote in Extreme Ownership: “One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss.” When the debate on a particular course of action ends and the boss makes a decision—even if you disagree with the decision—“you must execute the plan as if it were your own.” Only if the orders coming down from senior leadership are illegal, immoral, unethical, or significantly risky to lives, limbs, or the strategic success of the organization should a subordinate leader hold fast against directives from superiors. Those cases should be rare. Chapter

The Phlegmatic-Sanguine Person (PHLEG-SAN) These people are mostly seen as introverts. They are most peaceful people who go forgo their rights in order to live peacefully with others. Their temperament combination makes them very ideal people to get along with. Strengths of the PHLEG-SAN person They are gentle people who are honored in any group they find themselves. They are also very thoughtful and diplomatic. They are dependable and will rarely let the secret confided to them by friends. They have self-control. They are rarely seen exchanging words with people. They prefer forfeiting their rights and living peacefully with people to demanding these, which may lead to married relations. They enjoy the quiet life. They are the types who tell jokes without laughing. while others are laughing, they remain quiet, as if the humor came from somewhere else. It seems all fields of work are open to them. For example, they are good accountants, registrars, ministers, mechanics, teachers, and counsellors. This group of people do not enjoy trading activities but can do them when motivated Weaknesses of the PHLEG-SAN person These types of people are almost similar to their counterpart- the SAN-PHLEG. They lack motivation. They need to be motivated else they will leave their responsibilities undone. They allow themselves to be instructed and directed by people around them. Thus here, they fall victim to the sin of negligence. They procrastinate and often come out late. As senior officers their trays are always full of pending letters. They build shells around themselves and avoid many people and activities that could be useful to them in future. They let golden opportunities to pass by peacefully. Unless they develop personal discipline, they may never develop their natural potential. They are fearful; they need little motivation to put them to action. They lead a too relaxed life; they can even fall asleep while waiting for friends at the reception. A person of this temperament can always move peacefully with the strong willed CHOL-MEL person.

Reagan passed out prepublication copies of Mandate to his incoming cabinet secretaries and senior staff in December. Mandate for Leadership became a rare think tank product on the bestseller list in the Washington, D.C., area.

The distribution of tasks amongst the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.

When someone at the Directors’ College asked Campbell about the most crucial skill for a senior executive, he said it was the rare ability (which Jobs had in spades) to make sure that the short-term stuff gets done and done well, while simultaneously never losing sight of the big picture.

See, anyone who views Fox News as a mere cable channel, no different than AMC or TBS, is missing what it really is. Fox is an addictive substance. For its biggest fans, Fox is an identity. Almost a way of life. Hardcore viewers rarely change the channel or seek out a balanced media diet. They compare the network to a church, to a senior center, to a city hall.

But there's a rare-spoken-of-rule players must adapt from our very first pickup game as freshman: never out play a senior. Never. No matter what tricks we've got up our sleeves, not matter how much gas we have left at the end of a game to breakaway and head for the goal, we're all taught to hold back. Wait for our turn or as my dad likes to say, "Otter hockey is a highly productive, fine tuned-machine. Everyone has to play their part or the machine breaks down and nothing gets made or sold.

Nash and her husband, Roy Stone, have worked for the Los Angeles library for a combined total of seventy-nine years. (Not long after I interviewed them, they both retired.) It was Nash’s purse that Glen Creason and Stone had been looking for immediately after the fire, when they discovered that the Patent Room had melted. Nash and Stone are library people. Besides being a senior librarian, Stone had been the head of the Librarians’ Guild for many years. He once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns. He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge, that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.

This practice often produces a receivables asset that is one of the largest tangible assets on a company's balance sheet. A review of the 2004 Fortune 500 certainly reveals this truth. Receivables ranked among the top three tangible assets for 75% of the top 100 companies. Surprisingly, management of this multi-million (or multi-bil- lion) dollar asset rarely receives much senior management attention, except when a serious problem develops. The custodians of the receivables asset are similar to umpires of a baseball game; they are not noticed unless they do

That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt—unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey.

Amazon has a deep belief in setting goals that stretch teams and individuals but defining them in a way that puts the team in control of hitting these lofty goals. This empowers teams and stretches them to great achievements. Of course, many of the goals have a direct customer experience component and rarely are they revenue-oriented. “Senior leaders that are new to Amazon are often surprised by how little time we spend discussing actual financial results or debating projected financial outputs,” wrote Bezos. “To be clear, we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you’ve got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entrants with double firsts from Oxford practice a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary. That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt—unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey. Fortunately for us we have just the man.