Successful Implementation Quotes

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Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
The elegance under pressure is the result of fearlessness.
Ashish Patel
Politicians and corporate leaders who appeared to rule over their fellow humans were actually only puppets for the Masters, who used them to implement all their agendas to ensure a continuation of separation and control. In this way, when the populace became irate at a politician or corporate leader, the Masters would force them to resign from their position and have another puppet take their place. The populace would believe the problem had been taken care of and real change had occurred, that the root of the problem had been fixed, so they would rejoice and become complacent. When in actuality, the same old revolving-door record would play over and over again, with the real root of power, the Masters, staying at the helm of the ship.
Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
Susanna Kaysen
The success of a strategy largely depends on it's implementation. You can have a good strategy, you can have a winning game plan, but ultimately you and your team have to implement the strategy and execute and put the game plan into action if your business is going to succeed.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
Guy Kawasaki
They had a place where they belonged, and, even if it was because he didn't want to deal with their being different, he didn't treat them any differently. Which I think is a pretty successful implementation of Christianity.
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
the ‘divide & conquer’ principle has been successfully implemented on our planet and is being used very effectively to keep us under control and in a perpetual state of conflict.
Michael Tellinger (UBUNTU Contributionism - A Blueprint For Human Prosperity)
Then accumulated knowledge is not wisdom? A Great heavens, no! If knowledge were wisdom, the achievements of science would not have been converted into implements of destruction.
Napoleon Hill (Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success)
Successful people do daily what unsuccessful people do occasionally. They practice daily disciplines. They implement systems for their personal growth. They make it a habit to maintain a positive attitude. At
John C. Maxwell (Good Leaders Ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership)
My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.
Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win)
A successful blitz requires a well-thought-out strategy and flawless execution. Similarly, effective corporate governance involves developing and implementing sound strategies that align with the company's goals and values.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
Decide your objectives and make somebody responsible to implement the results for the growth of the business.
Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
It doesn’t matter which continent I am working in; I typically encounter three-employee change standpoints: Advocates, Observers and Rebels. However, to successfully implement organisational change management, we must engage, communicate and entice these three employee groups to get buy-in, change adoption and benefits realisation
Peter F Gallagher
Organizations seek to implement change because they acknowledge that the present version of the business is insufficient and that to ensure business continuity the business must manifest a new version of itself.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
To be successful in life , Plan, Implement, Revise, Update, and Build on Change.
Abhysheq Shukla (KISS Life "Life is what you make it")
Putting coalitions in place that consist of various stakeholders is often times crucial to a successful change management implementation.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans.
Guy Kawasaki
When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.
Ashish Patel
Random things keep happening, which are completely out of your control, and you can only control your reaction to an out-of-control situation. My real success, I believe, lies in my ability to make decisions and implement them superfast.
Ram Gopal Varma (Guns & Thighs: The Story of My Life)
Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
If you aim to be the best then it's essential to evolve constantly, learn from past mistakes, look for new opportunities and have the flexibility to implement improved processes and solutions along the way.
Mark Gallagher
The world tried to crush you, and you refused to be shattered. You've recovered from every setback a stronger person, rising form the ashes only to astonish everyone around you. And you will continue to surprise and confuse those who underestimate you. It is an inevitability. A forgone conclusion. But you should know now that being a leader is a thankless occupation. Few will ever be grateful for what you do or for the changes you implement. Their memories will be short, convenient. Your every success will be scruntinized. Your accomplishments will be brushed aside, breeding only greater expectations from those around you. Your power will push you further away from your friends. You will be made to feel lonely. Lost. You will long for validation from those you once admired, agonizing between pleasing old friends and doing what is right. But you must never, ever let the idiots into your head. They will only lead you astray.
Tahereh Mafi (Restore Me (Shatter Me, #4))
When we're talking about implementing change in business, it's good have a holistic view and to consider all of the dynamics, including: What is the scope of the change? Who is being impacted (customers, employees, others)? How are people being impacted, and in what way? Are there different perspectives regarding the experience of the change? What exactly is being changed (systems, processes, jobs)? What is the expected timeline for the change?
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.
Gabriel Weinberg (Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers)
At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.
C.A.R. Hoare
Dreaming is good but implementation is success
Paballo Seipei
The goal isn’t not to fail; the goal is to fail faster so that the lessons from the failures can be implemented and lead you to success more quickly.
Shannon Lee (Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee)
An entrepreneur’s challenge is to design and successfully implement a new business model.
Alexander Osterwalder (Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series 1))
However, not only external expansion of state power is brought about by the ideology of nationalism. War as the natural outgrowth of nationalism is also the means of strengthening the state’s internal powers of exploitation and expropriation. Each war is also an internal emergency situation, and an emergency requires and seems to justify the acceptance of the state’s increasing its control over its own population. Such increased control gained through the creation of emergencies is reduced during peacetime, but it never sinks back to its pre-war levels. Rather, each successfully ended war (and only successful governments can survive) is used by the government and its intellectuals to propagate the idea that it was only because of nationalistic vigilance and expanded governmental powers that the “foreign aggressors” were crushed and one’s own country saved, and that this successful recipe must then be retained in order to be prepared for the next emergency. Led by the just proven “dominant” nationalism, each successful war ends with the attainment of a new peacetime high of governmental controls and thereby further strengthens a government’s appetite for implementing the next winnable international emergency.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy)
A “prospect” has a need for the product, a possible desire to own that product, and the financial capacity to implement that decision. You “spend” time with suspects; you “invest” time with prospects.
Zig Ziglar (Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know)
In an abstract sense, an application is successful if it correctly implements its specifications. Unfortunately, this pays only abstract bills. In reality, the success of a project is measured by how well it meets the expectations of its users.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
Weapons are never the implements of good fortune, and they are to be detested. Therefore, the wise leader avoids them. Normally the wise leader values patience, but when at war he values action. Since he is opposed to the use of weapons, he uses them only when it is unavoidable, and even then with great restraint. To praise victory in war is to rejoice in the slaughter of men. The slaughter of men causes grief and sorrow to the people, therefore he who rejoices in this will not be successful. Fortune follows the restrained, misfortune follows the ambitious. Therefore victory in war should not be celebrated, but instead should be met with mourning.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
Doing Something with What You Read. While you can become an expert based on what you learn while reading, the true benefits will occur when you start to implement the ideas and concepts you have learned about. You can also take it to the next level when you share what you learn with others.
Stan Skrabut (Read to Succeed: The Power of Books to Transform Your Life and Put You on the Path to Success)
Prayer cannot be measured on a scale of success or failure because it is God's work - and God always succeeds. When we believe we have failed at prayer, it is because we decided what shape our prayer should have and are now frustrated that there is nothing we can do to implement our ambition. Prayer is nothing more or less than the interior action of the Trinity at the level of being. This we cannot control; we can only reverently submit.
Michael Casey (Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer)
Also, the technologically high-risk Apollo aerospace programme is considered a classic success story of megaproject planning and implementation. The cost overrun on this US$21 billion project was only 5 per cent. Few know, however, that the original budget estimate included US$8 billion of contingencies.18 By allowing for risk with foresight, the programme avoided ending up in the type of large cost overrun that destabilises many major projects during implementation. The Apollo approach, with its realistic view of risks, costs and contingencies, should be adopted in more major projects.
Bent Flyvbjerg (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition)
Successful succession is more than selecting someone with an appropriate skill set—it’s about finding someone who is in lockstep with the original cause around which the company was founded. Great second or third CEOs don’t take the helm to implement their own vision of the future; they pick up the original banner and lead the company into the next generation. That’s why we call it succession, not replacement. There is a continuity of vision.
Simon Sinek (Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use
Aldo Leopold
Many are arrogant because of the knowledge they possess, but they have no knowledge of how arrogant they are.
Maddy Malhotra (How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy)
Good ideas must be shared, improved upon with the help of other good thinkers, and then they must be implemented and acted upon.
John C. Maxwell (Good Leaders Ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership)
The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.
Paul Gibbons (The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture)
People either fail in education or pass in education and fail in knowledge or pass in knowledge and fail in implementation. The one who crosses all these phases is successful.
Aiyaz Uddin (US Staffing Industry 2020)
Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
Chet Holmes (The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies)
Every day thousands of ideas are born, but few are ever successfully implemented.
Eraldo Banovac
when we work together, we achieve more. Character is not a concept that is simply spoken about, but actually manifests itself through our actions.
Jose A. Aviles (Peer Mentorship in High School: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing a Successful Peer Mentorship Program in Your School)
Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.
Scott M. Graffius (Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions)
Ensure that value is created for all stakeholders – customers, employees, partners, society, and investors – simultaneously
Justin Lokitz (Business Model Shifts: Six Ways to Create New Value For Customers)
These days, relationships don't last longer because all job interview questions have been implemented in our daily life.
Mwanandeke Kindembo
In teams where there are significant power differences, when team members with less power are better able to speak up, the team has more success implementing new technology changes.
Roger Schwarz (The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Coaches, and Trainers)
That dominance came to an abrupt end with the creation and implementation of what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy. The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.50 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”51 Similarly, John Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the racists.”52 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”53
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy. Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the wrong prescription.
Adolf Hitler
If we don’t have all of the facts at hand, we still need to let the interested parties know that we’re on top of the research but that it will take time. When that information is gathered, inform them in an expedient manner. If employing the solution falls within our authority, implement it as soon as possible. If approval is required, document a request swiftly so any lag time won’t be attributed to our inattention.
Ronald Harris (Concepts of Managing: A Road Map for Avoiding Career Hazards)
It became my mission to work with young people to help show them the way, not save them! But help them understand that there are choices that can be made that will make the difference for the rest of their lives.
Jose A. Aviles (Peer Mentorship in High School: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing a Successful Peer Mentorship Program in Your School)
this book. One of the core beliefs I hold is the importance of compounding. Compounding takes place when you attempt One More Try, time and time again. When you're successful in implementing a One More Try mentality, you'll create and compound more wins for yourself. Each of those wins creates an incremental advancement toward your goals. You stack them on top of each other to produce significant long‐term changes in your life.
Ed Mylett (The Power of One More: The Ultimate Guide to Happiness and Success)
Design thinking has been associated with massive team collaboration, which in turn, fosters employee engagement and maximizes productivity. Hence, it is a tool that should be emulated and implemented for the success of any business.
Hibatullah Jawhar
No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off. Unlike an implementation intention, which specifically states the time and location for a given behavior, habit stacking implicitly has the time and location built into it.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
Hence, what he wants—and it is openly admitted—is to implement nationalistic imperialism with methods he has borrowed from Marxism, including its technique of mass organization. But the success of this mass organization is to be ascribed to the masses and not to Hitler. It was man's authoritarian freedom-fearing structure that enabled his propaganda to take root. Hence, what is important about Hitler sociologically does not issue from his personality but from the importance attached to him by the masses. And what makes the problem all the more complex is the fact that Hitler held the masses, with whose help he wanted to carry out his imperialism, in complete contempt.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
The mantra of Phase 4 of Company Building is provided by the war-fighting doctrine of the U.S. Marine Corps: Whoever can make and implement his decisions consistently faster gains a tremendous, often decisive, advantage. Decision-making thus becomes a time-competitive process, and timeliness of decisions becomes essential to generating tempo.
Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win)
Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team. Ego can prevent a leader from conducting an honest, realistic assessment of his or her own performance and the performance of the team.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
A beautiful game plan. If indeed we lived a life in imitation of his, our witness would be irresistible. If we dared to live beyond our self-concern; if we refused to shrink from being vulnerable; if we took nothing but a compassionate attitude toward the world; if we were a counterculture to our nation’s lunatic lust for pride of place, power, and possessions; if we preferred to be faithful rather than successful, the walls of indifference to Jesus Christ would crumble. A handful of us could be ignored by society; but hundreds, thousands, millions of such servants would overwhelm the world. Christians filled with the authenticity, commitment, and generosity of Jesus would be the most spectacular sign in the history of the human race. The call of Jesus is revolutionary. If we implemented it, we would change the world in a few months.
Brennan Manning (The Signature of Jesus)
A value-added step in a process is defined by three characteristics. First, the step must be something that the customer is willing to pay for. Second, the step must directly change the form, fit, or function of something to produce a product or service. The final characteristic of a value-added step is that it is so important that it must be done right every time to successfully produce the intended product or service.
Robert E. Hamm Jr. (Continuous Improvement; Values, Assumptions, and Beliefs for Successful Implementation: It’s All About the Culture)
  Our Sales Story. The story is foundational to everything we do in sales, and we use bits and pieces of it in all of our weapons. By “story” I’m referring to the language or talking points we use when asked what we do or when we tell someone about our business. It’s so critical to our success that the next two chapters are dedicated to helping you create and implement a succinct, powerful, differentiating, customer-focused story.
Mike Weinberg (New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development)
Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.
Scott M. Graffius (Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change)
Understand and influence students’ and teachers’ perceptions, tolerance, knowledge, and empathy about diverse populations to help increase students’ successful integration into American educational settings; Help teachers develop and implement tools and strategies in the classroom that encourage effective communication and understanding of and between members of diverse cultural backgrounds; Build and maintain collaborations between students, families, teachers, and other community members to assist diverse populations.
Donald L. Anderson (Cases and Exercises in Organization Development & Change)
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.22 It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones)
THE INITIAL STEP IN INDIVIDUAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES THAT YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE HONEST, OPEN, & VUNERABLE TO ADMIT YOUR SHORTCOMINGS; LOOK AT THE PATH YOU’VE TRAVELED; ACKNOWLEDGE ,THAT UNFAVORABLE EVENTS QUITE POSSIBLY WERE THE CONSEQUENSE OF YOUR POOR CHOICES; DEVELOPE A STRATEGY TO GET BACK ON TRACK WITH A WELL ALLUMINATED PATHWAY FOR REASONABLY ACHIEVABLE SUCCESS, WHATEVER WAY YOU DEFINE IT; AND KNOWING WHAT IS REQUIRED: POSSESING THE COURAGE, WILLINGNESS, & DESIRE TO IMPLEMENT POSITIVE CHANGE; CONSTANTLY & CONSISTENTLY FOREVER CHALLENGING YOURS ELF TO STRIVE FOR GREATNESS.
T.A. Guimont
The ‘Regal Seven (key) Ingredients of a Successful Company’ is: Pursue the goal of Profit Maximization keeping in mind the shareholders interests. To be achieved by developing and rendering Quality Goods and Services at a Reasonable Price. By inculcating Value and Ethics within the structure Through Sound People Management principles devised and effectively implemented. Further organizing Learning Programs and instill concept of ‘Learning and Earning’ Develop/Construct Customer Satisfaction. Build-Build-Build ; Build vision based values, Build your staff, Build customer satisfaction ; and witness your organization being built in the market.
Henrietta Newton Martin
Parenting is truly an exercise in patience, so be patient as you implement these ideas. Many times you may feel frustrated if your child does not respond the way you would like them to. Be calm and be positive. The essential thing is to be positive and to build a strong bond of connection with your child. When parents and children love, trust and respect each other, they can easily handle frustrating moments. So let love be your guiding principle as you teach your child to develop the skill set and mindset to raise their grades in school and position themselves for opportunities in college, scholarships, career and life. Let’s go Above & Beyond…
Nicoline Ambe (Above & Beyond: How To Help Your Child Get Good Grades In School, And Position Them For Success In College, Career & Life)
What is happening on the inside, is reflected on the outside. If you lack the confidence, you very well may feel pushy in selling your product or service. If you lack a clear plan on exactly how to grow your business, you’re going to play it safe rather than do what it takes. If you feel desperate, your prospect no doubt will feel your push. If you’re unclear about your exact target market, then implementing focused marketing will be nearly impossible because you don’t know where your target market hangs out, their preferences, and even what and where they buy. The more you nurture your inner entrepreneur, the more it affects the outcomes of your business.
Lisa A. Mininni
As a teacher, no matter what grade level, no matter how hard you try to engage the entire class or implement the suggestions above, you will still encounter “that one kid” who will get under your skin: the class clown, the smart-ass, the student who acts like you are pulling his teeth every time you ask him to do something, the kid who always has to say “this is stupid.” They are just part of the clientele base we serve and they can drive us to drinking (figuratively speaking…and sometimes literally).   Please remember that you are the adult.  The negativity or resistance “that one kid” radiates can be handled in a way that does not disturb the class structure.
Oran Tkatchov (Success for Every Student: A Guide to Teaching and Learning)
especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It
Thomas E. Ricks (The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today)
True learning is a permanent change in cognition and/or behavior. In other words, learning involves a permanent change in how you see and act in the world. The accumulation of information isn’t learning. Lots of people have heads full of information they don’t know what to do with. If you want to learn something quickly, you need to immerse yourself in that thing and immediately implement what you’re learning. The fastest way to learn Spanish, for instance, is by immersing yourself in a Spanish culture. Flash cards for fifteen minutes a day will eventually get you there. But you’ll make deeper connections with a few days fully immersed than you would in months of “dabbling.
Benjamin P. Hardy (Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success)
Peacekeeping is a soldier-intensive business in which the quality of troops matters as much as the quantity. It is not just soldiering under a different color helmet; it differs in kind from anything else soldiers do. The are medals and rewards (mainly, the satisfaction of saving lives), but there are also casualties. And no victories. It is not a risk -free enterprise. In Bosnia, mines, snipers, mountainous terrain, extreme weather conditions, and possible civil disturbances were major threats that had to be dealt with from the outset of the operation. Dag Hammarskjold once remarked, "Peacekeeping is a job not suited to soldiers, but a job only soldiers can do." Humanitarianism conflicts with peacekeeping and still more with peace enforcement. The threat of force, if it is to be effective, will sooner or later involve the use of force. For example, the same UN soldiers in Bosnia under a different command and mandate essentially turned belligerence into compliance over night, demonstrating that a credible threat of force can yield results. Unlike, UNPROFOR, the NATO-led Implementation Force was a military success and helped bring stability to the region and to provide an "environment of hope" in which a nation can be reborn. It is now up to a complex array of international civil agencies to assist in putting in place lasting structures for democratic government and the will of the international community to ensure a lasting peace.
Larry Wentz
It could be argued that one of democracy’s greatest weaknesses is the ability to reform itself. Reform of democracy must, however, be at the heart of a successful plan to improve economic growth and global prosperity. So far this chapter has detailed how the democratic system inherently contains incentives for policymakers to implement bad policy choices that undermine long-term economic success. Nevertheless, as we seek solutions to remedy democracy’s failings, we should acknowledge that politicians in a liberal democracy need not be malicious or even inept to fall prey to short-term thinking. They are wholly rational actors—responding to voters, succumbing to media pressure, and battling to stay in office, even if it means they do so at the expense of the economy’s longer-term success. When democracy works, it delivers economic growth and fundamental freedoms in a way that no other system can. And when it fails, it is rarely, if ever, replaced by a system that can do a better job of delivering for its population. Therefore, creating growth requires that we preserve democratic capitalism’s core strengths—freedom, efficient markets, transparency, and correctly constructed incentives—and reform its weaknesses. Something must be done to remedy the political class’s severe case of myopia, correcting the mismatch between long-term economic challenges and election cycles, safeguarding independent economic choices from political pressures, and eliminating dysfunction and gridlock.
Dambisa Moyo (Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth-and How to Fix It)
Here are the four keys to successful commitments: 1. Strong desire: In order to fully commit to something, you need a clear and personally compelling reason. Without a strong desire you will struggle when the implementation gets difficult, but with a compelling desire, seemingly insurmountable obstacles are seen as challenges to be met. The desired end result needs to be meaningful enough to get you through the hard times and keep you on track. 2. Keystone actions: Once you have an intense desire to accomplish something, you then need to identify the core actions that will produce the result you’re after. In today’s world, many of us have become spectators rather than participants. We must remember that it’s what we do that counts. In most endeavors there are often many activities that help you accomplish your goal. However there are usually a few core activities that account for the majority of the results, and in some cases there are only one or two keystone actions that ultimately produce the result. It is critical that you identify these keystones and focus on them. 3. Count the costs: Commitments require sacrifice. In any effort there are benefits and costs. Too often we claim to commit to something without considering the costs, the hardships that will have to be overcome to accomplish your desire. Costs can include time, money, risk, uncertainty, loss of comfort, and so on. Identifying the costs before you commit allows you to consciously choose whether you are willing to pay the price of your commitment. When you face any of these costs, it is extremely helpful to recognize that you anticipated them and decided that reaching your goal was worth it. 4. Act on commitments, not feelings: There will be times when you won’t feel like doing the critical activities. We’ve all been there. Getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to jog in the winter cold can be daunting, especially when you’re in a toasty warm bed. It is during these times that you will need to learn to act on your commitments instead of your feelings. If you don’t, you will never build any momentum and will get stuck continually restarting or, as is so often the case, giving up. Learning to do the things you need to do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.
Brian P. Moran (The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months)
It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.
Grant Cardone (Be Obsessed or Be Average)
The person doing the willing thus acquires the joyful feelings of the successful implements carrying out the order, the serviceable “under-wills” or under-souls — our body is, in fact, merely a social construct of many souls — in addition to his joyful feeling as the one who commands. L’effet c’est moi [The effect is I]. What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy community — the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. All willing is simply a matter of giving orders and obeying, on the basis, as mentioned, of a social construct of many “souls”: for this reason a philosopher should arrogate to himself the right to include willing as such within the field of morality: morality, that is, understood as a doctrine of the relationships of dominance under which the phenomenon “living” arises.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition. Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.
Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
Get started with the new, happy life you deserve by reading Be Happy! How to Stop Negative Thinking, Start Focusing on the Positive, and Create Your Happiness Mindset today by clicking here! The Stress-Free You: How to Live Stress-Free and Feel Great Every Day, Starting Today – Elizabeth O’Brien Stressors are everywhere. Each and every day, we run into situations that constantly test us, rob us of our patience, strip us of our sanity, impact our focus, and cause us to lose control of our days. Inside The Stres- Free You: How to Live Stress-Free and Feel Great Every Day, Starting Today is an easy-to-implement system which you can use today to knock out the stressors in your life one by one. You’ll also discover why a little stress is good for you and why your body becomes “overloaded” with chronic stress, how to assess your stress level and take definite action steps to tame the wild beast of stress, stress
Colleen Archer (The Power of the Positive - Achieve Fulfillment, Success, and Happiness Using Powerful, Positive Affirmations)
Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What? Got the answer to that?
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
Keeping a new church outwardly focused from the beginning is much easier than trying to refocus an inwardly concerned church. In order to plant a successful church, you have to know that you know that you are undeniably called by God. The call to start a new church plant is not the same as the call to serve in an existing church or work in a ministry-related organization. You may be the greatest preacher this side of Billy Graham but still not be called to start a church. If you think you may have allowed an improper reason, voice or emotion to lead you to the idea of starting a new church, back away now. Spend some more time with God. You don’t want to move forward on a hunch or because you feel “pretty sure” that you should be planting a church. You have to be completely certain. “You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’” When you think of a people group that you might be called to reach, does your heart break for them? If so, you may want to consider whether God is specifically calling you to reach that group for His kingdom. Is your calling clear? Has your calling been confirmed by others? Are you humbled by the call? Have you acted on your call? Do you know for certain that God has called you to start a new church? Nail it down. When exactly were you called? What were the circumstances surrounding your call? How did it match up with the sources of proper calling? Do you recognize the four specific calls in your calling? How? How does your call measure up to biblical characteristics? What is the emerging vision that God is giving you with this call? As your dependence on God grows, so will your church. One of the most common mistakes that enthusiastic and well-meaning church starters make is to move to a new location and start trying to reach people without thinking through even a short-term strategy. Don’t begin until you count the cost. why would you even consider starting a church (the only institution Jesus left behind and the only one that will last forever) without first developing a God-infused, specific, winning strategy? There are two types of pain: the pain of front-end discipline and the pain of back-end regret. With the question of strategy development, you get to choose which pain you’d rather live with. Basically, a purpose, mission and vision statement provides guiding principles that describe what God has called you to do (mission), how you will do it (purpose) and what it will look like when you get it done (vision). Keep your statement simple. Be as precise as possible. Core values are the filter through which you fulfill your strategy. These are important, because your entire strategy will be created and implemented in such a way as to bring your core values to life. Your strategic aim will serve as the beacon that guides the rest of your strategy. It is the initial purpose for which you are writing your strategy. He will not send more people to you than you are ready to receive. So what can you do? The same thing Dr. Graham does. Prepare in a way that enables God to open the floodgates into your church. If you are truly ready, He will send people your way. If you do the work we’ve described in this chapter, you’ll be able to build your new church on a strong base of God-breathed preparation. You’ll know where you are, where you’re going and how you are going to get there. You’ll be standing in the rain with a huge bucket, ready to take in the deluge. However, if you don’t think through your strategy, write it down and then implement it, you’ll be like the man who stands in the rainstorm with a Dixie cup. You’ll be completely unprepared to capture what God is pouring out. The choice is yours!
Nelson Searcy (Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch)
The critical infrastructure of Indigenous worlds is, fundamentally, about responsibility and being a good relative. But our responsibilities do not happen only in the realm of political transformation. Caretaking, which we address in the introduction and in Part III, is the basis, too, for vibrant economies that must work fluidly with political structures to reinforce the world we seek to build beyond capitalism. We must thus have faith in our own forms of Indigenous political economy, the critical infrastructures that Huson speaks of so eloquently. We must rigorously study, theorize, enact, and experiment with these forms. While it covers ambitious terrain, The Red Deal at its base provides a program for study, theorization, action, and experimentation. But we must do the work. And the cold, hard truth is that we must not only be willing to do the work on a small scale whenever it suits us—in our own lives, in our families, or even in The Red Nation. We must be willing, as our fearless Wet’suwet’en relatives have done, to enforce these orders on a large scale. In conversation, our The Red Nation comrade Nick Estes stated, “I don’t want to just honor the treaties. I want to enforce them.” We can and should implement these programs in our own communities to alleviate suffering and protect what lands we are still able to caretake under colonial rule. To survive extinction, however, we must enforce Indigenous orders in and amongst those who have made it clear they will not stop their plunder until we are all dead. Settler and imperial nations, military superpowers, multinational corporations, and members of the ruling class are enemies of the Earth and the greatest danger to our future. How will we enforce Indigenous political, scientific, and economic orders to successfully prevent our mass ruin? This is the challenge we confront and pose in The Red Deal, and it is the challenge that all who take up The Red Deal must also confront.
The Red Nation (The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth)
Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.2 Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.
David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
The most effective way to make time for traction is through “timeboxing.” Timeboxing uses a well-researched technique psychologists call “setting an implementation intention,” which is a fancy way of saying, “deciding what you’re going to do, and when you’re going to do it.” It’s a technique that can be used to make time for traction in each of your life domains. The goal is to eliminate all white space on your calendar so you’re left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each day. It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation. Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted. If you’re not spending your time doing what you’d planned, you’re off track.
Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.
Noam Chomsky (How the World Works)
If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.” - “The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett- Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.” - “Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.” - “The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.” - “It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.” - “Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
As I write this, I know there are countless mysteries about the future of business that we’ve yet to unravel. That’s a process that will never end. When it comes to customer success, however, I have achieved absolute clarity on four points. First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business. Success will involve using these tools to understand your customers like never before so that you can deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences. The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home. The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all. The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination. The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind. Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them. To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.
Marc Benioff (Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change)
The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.
Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
The Midnight Game The "Midnight Game" is an old pagan ritual, used mainly as punishment for those who have broken the laws of the pagan religion in question.  While it was mainly used as a scare tactic to not disobey the gods, there is still a very existent chance of death to those who play the Midnight Game.  There is an even higher chance of permanent mental scarring. It is highly recommended that you DO NOT PLAY THE MIDNIGHT GAME.   However, for those few thrill seekers searching for a rush, or for those delving into obscure occult rituals, these are simple instructions on how to play. Do so at your own risk...   WARNING: I have played this game. People have died. Do not play this game. He will always be watching.   Instructions   PREREQUISITES:   It must be exactly 12:00 AM when you begin performing the ritual. Otherwise, it will not work.   MATERIALS:   You will need a candle, a piece of paper, a writing implement, matches or a lighter, salt, a wooden door, and at least one drop of your own blood. If you are playing with multiple people, they will need their own of the aforementioned materials and they will have to perform the steps below accordingly.   STEP 1:   Write your full name (first, middle, and last)on the piece of paper. Put at least one drop of blood on the paper. Allow it to soak into the paper.   STEP 2:   Turn off all of the lights in the place you are doing this. Go to your wooden door, and place the paper with your name on it in front of the door. Now, take out the candle and light it. Place it on top of the paper.   STEP 3:   Knock on the door twenty-two times. The hour must be 12:00 AM upon the final knock. Then, open the door, blow out the candle, and close the door. You have just allowed the "Midnight Man" to enter your house.   STEP 4:   Immediately relite your candle.   This is where the game begins. You must now lurk around your now completely dark house, with the lit candle in your hand. Your goal is to avoid the Midnight Man at all costs, until 3:33 AM. Should your candle ever go out, that means the Midnight Man is near you. You must relight your candle in the next ten seconds.   If you are not successful in doing this, you must then immediately surround yourself with a circle of salt. If you are unsuccessful in both of your actions, the Midnight Man will create a hallucination of your greatest fear, and rip out your organs one by one. You will feel it, but you will be unable to react.   If you are successful in creating the circle of salt, you must remain in there until 3:33 AM.   If you are successful in relighting your candle, you may proceed with the game. You must continue to 3:33 AM, without being attacked by the Midnight Man, or being trapped inside the circle of salt, to win the Midnight Game. The Midnight Man will leave your house at 3:33 AM, and you will be safe to proceed with your morning.   ADDITION:   Indications that you are near the Midnight Man will include sudden drop in temperature, seeing a pure black, humanoid figure through the darkness, and hearing very soft whispering coming from an indiscernible source. If you experience any of these, it is advised that you leave the area to avoid the Midnight Man.   DO NOT turn any of the lights on during the Midnight Game.   DO NOT use a flashlight during the Midnight Game.   DO NOT go to sleep during the Midnight Game.   DO NOT attempt to use another person's blood on your name.   DO NOT use a lighter as a substitute for a candle. It will not work.   AND DEFINITELY DO NOT attempt to provoke the Midnight Man in ANY WAY.   Even when the game is over, he will always be watching
Adam L. (Creepypasta: Expanded Edition)
Freicoin was introduced in July 2012. It is a demurrage currency, meaning it has a negative interest rate for stored value. Value stored in Freicoin is assessed a 4.5% APR fee, to encourage consumption and discourage hoarding of money. Freicoin is notable in that it implements a monetary policy that is the exact opposite of Bitcoin’s deflationary policy. Freicoin has not seen success as a currency, but it is an interesting example of the variety of monetary policies that can be expressed by alt coins.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies)
Just begin implementing any of your business ideas and in the process many bigger ideas will come to you. Great ideas are created based on your life experiences and to get them you should be actively doing something.
Andrii Sedniev (The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas)
Along the way after introductions to putting Boyd’s, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz (two other brilliant military (human conflict) thinkers) as well as other’s thoughts to practice, we begin introductions to actually implementing these ideas in the classroom along with examples of how they translated to the street. Over the course of the book, these real-world examples compile to actually form a real world Program of Instruction (POI) for a course that was implemented successful in a large police force just a couple of years ago.
Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
Remedies exist for correcting substantial departures from normality, but these remedies may make matters worse when departures from normality are minimal. The first course of action is to identify and remove any outliers that may affect the mean and standard deviation. The second course of action is variable transformation, which involves transforming the variable, often by taking log(x), of each observation, and then testing the transformed variable for normality. Variable transformation may address excessive skewness by adjusting the measurement scale, thereby helping variables to better approximate normality.8 Substantively, we strongly prefer to make conclusions that satisfy test assumptions, regardless of which measurement scale is chosen.9 Keep in mind that when variables are transformed, the units in which results are expressed are transformed, as well. An example of variable transformation is provided in the second working example. Typically, analysts have different ways to address test violations. Examination of the causes of assumption violations often helps analysts to better understand their data. Different approaches may be successful for addressing test assumptions. Analysts should not merely go by the result of one approach that supports their case, ignoring others that perhaps do not. Rather, analysts should rely on the weight of robust, converging results to support their final test conclusions. Working Example 1 Earlier we discussed efforts to reduce high school violence by enrolling violence-prone students into classes that address anger management. Now, after some time, administrators and managers want to know whether the program is effective. As part of this assessment, students are asked to report their perception of safety at school. An index variable is constructed from different items measuring safety (see Chapter 3). Each item is measured on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree), and the index is constructed such that a high value indicates that students feel safe.10 The survey was initially administered at the beginning of the program. Now, almost a year later, the survey is implemented again.11 Administrators want to know whether students who did not participate in the anger management program feel that the climate is now safer. The analysis included here focuses on 10th graders. For practical purposes, the samples of 10th graders at the beginning of the program and one year later are regarded as independent samples; the subjects are not matched. Descriptive analysis shows that the mean perception of
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
A scaling premortem works something like this: when your team is on the verge of making and implementing a big decision, call a meeting and ask each member to imagine that it is, say, a year later. Split them into two groups. Have one group imagine that the effort was an unmitigated disaster. Have the other pretend it was a roaring success. Ask each member to work independently and generate reasons, or better yet, write a story, about why the success or failure occurred. Instruct them to be as detailed as possible and, as Klein emphasizes, to identify causes that they wouldn’t usually mention “for fear of being impolitic.” Next, have each person in the “failure” group read his or her list or story aloud, and record and collate the reasons. Repeat this process with the “success” group. Finally, use the reasons from both groups to strengthen your scaling plan. If you uncover overwhelming and impassable roadblocks, then go back to the drawing board.
Robert I. Sutton (Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less)
Rich Crandall, who directs the K–12 Lab, says a key to successful implementation of design thinking is to build ownership from the ground up. “It’s important that design thinking doesn’t feel like an add-on or an extra thing that teachers have to do,” he says. When teachers come to the idea willingly and see how it connects to what they are already doing in the classroom, they’re more likely to invest the time and effort to learn new processes and strategies for working with students.
Suzie Boss (Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World (Solutions))
pragmatic psychology, skill set, strategy, and execution may just make you hard to beat! The commonly touted 80-20 rule in business states that roughly 80 percent of effects (outcomes) result from 20 percent of the causes. I prefer to think of it in the sense that about 80 percent of our results can come from 20 percent of our activities. I also believe that people should focus 80 percent of their time on (thinking about, planning, and implementing) the solution and not on (bickering and complaining endlessly about the people or the issues around) the problem, and that success stems from roughly 80 percent psychology and 20 percent mechanics. That being said, I coach my own
Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
good storyteller, build good relationships internally and externally with key ecosystem constituents, take calculated risks, be quickly adaptable and flexible, communicate humbly but firmly, recruit all the time, implement sound business processes, and execute-execute-execute pragmatically within your ecosystem with purpose! If not, success will be just a pipe dream or fleeting experience, as building a start-up successfully is quite difficult. And great ideas don’t just come to you. You must pursue them. Regardless of what your vision for the future is, find ways to keep strengthening your pragmatic combination of mind-set, skill set, direction, strategies, know-how, and execution! If the featured young
Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)