Quotes from Jonathan Raymond

Our strengths are not our own until they are freed of the burden of having to heal the past.

All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to.

As a manager, the more you talk about something without following up with action, the less those words will matter.

Keep your focus and theirs not on checking tasks off of lists, but on finding root causes. Hold them accountable for personal behavior; don't let them indulge in excuses or blame the system. Show them how taking ownership of their work and taking ownership of their life are exactly the same thing.

In my new business, this is one of the things we work actively with CEOs to see: how one idea from the top can spiral into 100 projects for the team and overwhelm them in ways the CEOs can't even imagine. But

Great accountability is nothing more and nothing less than having the courage to demand that the people who work for you use their strengths in a responsible way. Learning

We rolled back the clock in a full company meeting and shared each of the steps that came together to help us arrive at this decision that was going to impact everyone on the team. We wanted to show people what "risk being right" looked like to us. How

And she had discovered the best reason, the one that trumps all others: She did it because she liked the way it made her feel. Is

People who have a choice will no longer work to serve your reasons, your goals. They will not work to serve your authority, they will only work to serve their own.

The earlier you intervene, the less likely that people will get defensive. The more real-time and specific your feedback is, the easier it is for people to receive it and learn from it. The

Cultural listening is the skill of being able to see beyond the symptom to the underlying dynamic. It's an extremely powerful tool to develop as a leader, whether you're the CEO, a team leader, or a solopreneur just starting out.

a manager inhabits the most interpersonally complex role in a modern organization, in many ways more complex than the CEO role.

Emotional transparency as opposed to emotional expression—saying what you feel instead of acting it out—is key to creating a healthy team and cultural dynamic. The emotion isn't unnecessary, only the drama is! The

To be a manager is to be part detective. The clues are everywhere, the skill is in reading them. When

And the beavers. They lived in big dams like brownstones or Tudors in Boston or New York. Whole cities of them, gathering up twigs, mixing mortar, patting it down with their tails, all split up into little groups of labor. Smart animals, the beavers. Some of them grew to five feet tall, but they've all been killed off already, the first to go when the white hunters arrived. Well

Henry said, getting up to piss against a tree, the coming of the white man ain't all bad. I like the Chinooks and all, the Flatheads, too, but there's something about talking in your native tongue that just lets the friendship flow better.

Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.

Banks will fee you to death. If you bounce a check, the bank has a policy to re-post the check three more times to see if it will be paid. If it continues to bounce they charge a $30 overdraft every time. So, one bounced check will rack up $90 for the bank.

You can't know what you don't know. You can't know about things you have yet to discover.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

People get into debt head over heels because banks make it so easy to do so. Then the banks come along and act like these people who can't or won't pay their bills are the dregs of society.