Quotes About Performance

Which of you are doing only what you were hired to do?

Talk does not cook rice. —Chinese proverb

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform.

You need no new skills to increase your productivity—just a new set of behaviors about when and where to apply them.

Her father was a magician. She assisted him. I'm sure she's quite adept at sleight of

To Kyf Brewer and Orlagh Cassidy, for your amazing audio performances.

Shoot you down. Bang! Bang! - Velvet Goldmine

In driving for cultural change, it's a mistake to become overly constrained by your desired culture as you've defined it. Are there any other, related behaviors, values, or principles that support high performance than the ones you've formally adopted? If so, don't hesitate to push these as well.

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you'll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company's strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

We made performance reviews more substantive and serious by changing them to include a measure on each of the Twelve Behaviors, and by requiring that each manager secure his or her boss's approval of each appraisal (see chapter 5

we made a practice of publicizing internally the top ten and bottom ten performers on HOS. Leaders and teams liked placing in the top ten, but they absolutely detested being publicly identified as a bottom-ten performer. This tactic helped generate a sense of urgency around HOS, raising performance across the entire organization. In fact, I recommend using this tactic whenever you're trying to change anything in an organization.

Too many leaders expect their people to adapt to their particular leadership style. If you want the best performance, look beyond your style and provide feedback tailored to the individual.

Criticizing privately might be appropriate in certain, sensitive cases, but in general both criticism and praise should be public. Your people have to understand that certain behaviors or performance are unacceptable. Otherwise they'll wonder why the organization allows it. When leaders share both criticism and praise publicly, team members learn about the high performance culture you're striving to create.

When you ask leaders to do more, and they deliver over both the short and long term, leading to wins for shareholders and customers, then those leaders deserve higher than average compensation.

Well-constructed academic studies confirm the theoretical premise. Robert Arnott's 2000 examination of U.S. equity mutual-fund returns shows a twenty-year pre-tax deficit of 2.1 percent per year relative to the result achieved by investors in Vanguard's 500 Index Fund. Nearly 80 percent of actively managed funds failed to reach Vanguard's market-mimicking return.

The harsh reality of the negative-sum game dictates that, in aggregate, active managers lose to the market by the amount it costs to play in the form of management fees, trading commissions, and dealer spread. Wall Street's share of the pie defines the amount of performance drag experienced by the would-be market beaters.

To the extent that size impedes performance, increases in assets lead to lower returns for fund shareholders.

Security selection may provide substantial excess returns to skilled investors, but those excess returns come directly from the pockets of other players who suffer poor relative returns. When aggregating the returns for all actively managed portfolios, the combined results inevitably mimic the market, less a discount equal to the amount paid to play the game. For the investment community as a whole, security selection plays a return-reducing role in investment performance.

The aggregate of the compensation paid to mutual-fund managers virtually guarantees that investors fail to achieve market-beating results.

Chapter 8, Obvious Sources of Mutual-Fund Failure, concludes that, in the highly efficient securities markets, mutual-fund managers lose by the amount that it costs to play the game.

La mayor diferencia entre los ejecutivos exitosos y los que fracasaron era la inteligencia emocional (Fernández-Aráoz, 2001).

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

In life, the microphone passes your lips but once... you had better be ready to sing.