Quotes About Performance

the balance sheet is the company's thermometer. It lets you know whether you're healthy or not.

THE ULTIMATE HIGHER LAW When you appeal to the highest level of thinking, you get the highest level of performance.

Standards are tools for finding solutions. benchmarks can turn an operation around

Together they went to the chamber and performed a number of erotic exercises, after which Cugel collapsed into a sleep of utter exhaustion

Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

That's more easily said than done;

From my days in the Pit, I learned that the game is all about fielding the best athletes. Whoever fielded the best team there won. Reuben Gutoff reinforced that it was no different in business. Winning teams come from differentiation, rewarding the best and removing the weakest, always fighting to raise the bar. I was lucky to get out of the pile and learn this my very first year at GE—the hard way, by nearly quitting the company.

GE's system of differentiation, which separates employees into three performance categories and manages them up or out accordingly.

I always follow 4E's wrapped in a 'P

La genialità ha bisogno di un pubblico.

professional artiste

In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.

Those who are not prepared for the apprehension of a great purpose should fix the thoughts upon the faultless performance of their duty, no matter how insignificant their task may appear. Only in this way can the thoughts be gathered and focussed, and resolution and energy be developed, which being done, there is nothing which may not be accomplished.

Doing my best in any situation is all I can do. If I worry about it while I'm doing it, I won't do my best.

I would watch either Michael Cera doing comedy or Louis CK doing stand-up. This would

If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.

When I was running a software company, we always knew it would take one great programmer to solve a hard problem in one night versus 10 mediocre programmers taking a month to screw up a problem even worse.

Prominent behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely has done research that tells us that the peak productivity period in a person's day is 2-5 hours after they wake up. After that, he says, there are declining returns on the work you put in.

Comedians are the best public speakers and are up against the most brutal audiences, so you must study them. Learn from them.

There's a saying in Argentina, "When the CEO is looking, the cow grows fatter." A business builds fastest when the CEO is looking at it, because

Always over-promise and over-deliver. Sometimes people hate that. They want to under promise and over deliver. Don't do that

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.

It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness. The friends I had, growing up and going to work, grew more bitter every day; and, conversely, they learned to hide this bitterness and to fit into the pattern Gentile and Jew alike had fixed for them.

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.