Quotes About Performance

Many organizations make the mistake of using metrics in place of thematic and strategic goals. This is a problem because metrics do not inspire enthusiasm among employees.

We have more money, better technology, and more talented and experienced executives than our competitors, and yet we are behind. What we lack is teamwork, and I can promise you all that I have no greater priority as CEO than making you, I mean, us, more effective as a group.

One of the most difficult challenges for a leader who wants to instill accountability on a team is to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism.

The most important principle that an executive must embrace is a desire to produce results. As obvious as this sounds, it is not universally practiced by the highest-ranking executives in many companies. Many CEOs put something ahead of results on their list of priorities, and it represents the most dangerous of all the temptations: the desire to protect the status of their careers.

An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance.

The ultimate test of a great team is results.

What's critical is that team members know that the areas that were identified will not go away, and that they will have to answer for their progress in the not-too-distant future.

and experienced executives than our competitors

Because people who aren't good at their jobs don't want to be measured, because then they have to be accountable for something. Great employees love that kind of accountability. They crave it. Poor ones run away from it.

A single-stack Glock could come close, but even if Glock did it, probably not.

Because they don't want to seem vulnerable. Humans have a lot of this attitude called 'pride,' which is sort of like the satisfaction you get when your machine performs correctly. Pride makes them act contrary to the way they really feel.

You don't need to improve your performance every time you train—this becomes impossible as you get more advanced—but your sessions should display a general line of progression through the months and years, or you've just been spinning your wheels.

He'd actually done it! He leaned back into the microphone and whispered to the now silent cave: 'Come to the Cabaret!

The subterranean homesick clown

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.

The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well.

In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.

Measurement and Leverage To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.

The best way to learn is to do; the worst way to teach is to talk.

It is a bad thing to be in a recession, and a good thing to recover, but one should never confuse the rapid growth that takes place during a recovery with an improvement in the economy's long-term performance: once the economy is near capacity, growth is bound to slow down. Moreover, recessions and recoveries depend far more on the Federal Reserve than on the administration in power, and happen to Republicans and Democrats alike.

another indicator of how well the company is doing is to see whether management is buying stock in the company as well.

Check out what's happening when you hear about heavier-than-usual volume (especially if you already own the stock).