Quotes About Performance

The company's twenty thousand workers are the best paid in the industry, but the company has the lowest labor cost per ton of steel, leads the industry in return on capital, has the lowest financial leverage of any major steel company, and has paid 142 consecutive dividends. Retaining the right people sets up the company to do lots more with less.

If a business isn't growing between 5 and 10 percent annually, the good, highly talented people won't get the responsibility and the financial rewards they want, and they'll leave.

A.T. Kearney research shows that the best performing companies had five hundred fewer managers per billion dollars in sales than poorer performing organizations.

It was an unexpected conclusion that rocked the Harvard research team. "Well-led teams have higher error rates than average or poorly led teams," the researchers concluded. Harvard was studying acute-care hospitals and other settings, including executive boardrooms. The results were consistent: Teams led by the best leaders made significantly more mistakes.

It was cool to do someone else's movie. It was a lot of fun.

I always think of the live show first, where the song is gonna go in the show. That's why they aren't sad songs. When I play, I want to make people happy, not sad. It's such a pleasure for me to do what I do, and I want other people to feel some form of that pleasure, too.

I didn't know if I had the music for it or if I could pull off the larger concert experience. Then I realized if I can just continue to be myself, I'll be all right.

I really enjoy theater. I just went to see 'Death of a Salesman ' and it knocked me on my ass.

My father wants to take your favorite song and play it better than you've ever heard. I want to take your least favorite song and play it so good that you like it.

A lot of times I would go into a room and audition for whatever sitcom it was and they would expect me to do sort of what my dad was doing and I am not him so they would be disappointed and I would feel nervous and not know exactly how to do it.

If you got a good imagination, a lot of confidence and you kind of know what you are saying, then you might be able to do it. I know a lot of colorful characters at home that would make great actors.

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.

Ninety-three percent of American motorists believe they are better-than-average drivers. In a 2007 BusinessWeek poll, 90 percent of the managers surveyed believed their performance in the workplace to be in the top 10 percent.4

Sixty-three percent of executives surveyed say that their biggest challenge to effective performance management is that their managers lack the courage and ability to have difficult feedback discussions.7

impact. Feedback-seeking behavior—as it's called in the research literature—has been linked to higher job satisfaction, greater creativity on the job, faster adaptation in a new organization or role, and lower turnover. And seeking out negative feedback is associated with higher performance ratings.

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback. And of course, as you move up, candid coaching becomes increasingly scarce, so you have to work harder to get it. But doing so sets the tone and creates an organizational culture of learning, problem solving, and adaptive high performance.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

The time has passed for dilly-dallying. We must demand satisfactory performance.

There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap, and without character.

Damn everything but the circus!. . .The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.

Goddamn everything but the circus

Damn everything but the Circus!

Oh, well,' Mrs. Zender continued, 'Mother always said that Mr. Zender had other talents. He was good looking, and I think Mother put looking good right up there with the harpsichord, an instrument that has limited performance time and requires a great deal of maintenance.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.