Quotes About Risk

right—premature hiring is the death of many companies.

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

Have some general backup ideas in mind, but don't let the backup plan be carved in stone. That will prevent you from learning. The time to begin building formalized backup plans is during the tweaking, changing, and maneuvering that occurs while studying the results of the small bet. Backup plans become vital when a small bet that's turned out to be successful is about to be scaled in size.

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it," when he added that those words are, in Powell's perspective, "a slogan for the complacent, the arrogant, or the scared." How can such a commonsense maxim be so insidious and disastrous? It's because of an immutable law of business: By the time you figure out it's broke, it's been broke for a very long time.

In the early days of IBM, when a newly promoted executive lost a lot of money on a bet that went wrong, founder Thomas Watson let everyone know he wasn't going to be fired. "Why would I fire him?" he asked. "We just spent thirty thousand dollars educating him.

Until people are able to figure out how to deal with the natural tendency to hesitate and drag their feet because of their fear of the unknown, no meaningful reinvention will occur.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: "Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

A shared human condition is the desire to leave an organization on an even keel, with everyone sharing fond memories. Those desires are hardly the things that make risk taking, radical change, and reinvention possible.

Here are nine reasons I've seen and heard most often as I search to understand why we hesitate: Why people hesitate to act Gotten too comfortable Study things to death Lack of confidence Think the big deal will fly in the window Think it's already too late for them Fear of losing what they have Afraid nobody will pitch in Family pressures to not take the risk Lack of financial safety net

The only guarantee in business is if you do nothing, nothing will happen. Also, as the school of hard knocks teaches, most good strategy is made by doing.

The refrain we constantly heard from the entrepreneurs and leaders during our research was to never bet the ranch but to make lots of small bets, learn from them, and then scale.

The self-assured Mr. White had made a single big bet and kissed one frog expecting it to turn into a prince, but had forgotten the rule of frogs and princes. You need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince!

It only seems like it would be funny to enter a bank wearing a ski mask.

What gives value to travel is fear.

Nadie se había atrevido a turbar el universo, o al menos no había sido yo.

Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!

He knew some fear should be respected, as it can keep you out of real danger. But he realized most of his fears were irrational and had kept him from changing when he needed to.

Only fools charge head without knowing what lies in wait. – Scourge

You can't lose a battle you never fight. - Revan

You have to make your own chances.

An entrepreneur in debt is an entrepreneur in business.

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.