Quotes About Performance

I'd like to see more stand-up routines venture into depicting tragedy. It's conventional to give people a humorous cathartic release; now I'd love to hear stand-up tragedy that would reduce the audience to exhausted tears.

It's an amazing feeling to think that people actually took time out of their lives to learn the words to our music. The adulation and sound of the crowd can be overwhelming, but the idea is to perform like you're performing for one person. Whether you're performing for 3 people or 30,000, you have to be 100 percent there. By

You said you didn't have experience with girls, but you sure seemed to know what you were doing up there." Jaime

When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

To understand a company's strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.

business. One particularly common one is RONA, or Return on Net Assets. In manufacturing businesses, this is calculated by dividing a company's income by its net assets. Hence, a company can be judged as being more profitable either by adding income to the numerator, or by reducing the assets in the denominator. Driving the numerator up is harder, because it entails selling more products. Driving the denominator down is often easier—because you can just opt to outsource.

products offering competitively superior shock resistance and mean time between failure (MTBF) were accorded a significant price premium, compared to competitive offerings.

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

Study after study, however, concludes that about 90 percent of all publicly traded companies have proved themselves unable to sustain for more than a few years a growth trajectory that creates above-average shareholder returns.

A product becomes a commodity within a specific market segment when the repeated changes in the basis of competition, as described above, completely play themselves out, that is, when market needs on each attribute or dimension of performance have been fully satisfied by more than one available product. The

When a measurable trajectory of improvement has been established, determining whether a new technology is likely to improve a product's performance relative to earlier products is an unambiguous question.

Well-managed companies are excellent at developing the sustaining technologies that improve the performance of their products in the ways that matter to their customers. This is because their management practices are biased toward: Listening to customers Investing aggressively in technologies that give those customers what they say they want Seeking higher margins Targeting larger markets rather than smaller ones

When the performance of two or more competing products has improved beyond what the market demands, customers can no longer base their choice upon which is the higher performing product.

There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

Allocation Resources Among Your "Businesses" In the words of Andy Grove: "To understand a company's strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.

Let me explain in management terms: police chiefs need to look at the numbers of each type of crime, over time, to know whether their strategy is working. The manager of a business cannot see the complete health of the company by looking at specific orders from specific customers; he or she needs to have things aggregated as revenues, costs, and profits.

it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow.

Kate had thought hula was something for tourists, girls in plastic skirts dancing to will songs about tiny bubbles in the champagne. Mehana's hula was different-a way of telling stories without words, a kimd of body poetry.

The man's head nodded to his chest; he looked like a drunk who had dozed off. But it was an act.

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues.

Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel not so terrible about my various emotional issues.

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.

wouldn't it be easier to just do a competent job than to spend all your time covering your ass?

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.