Quotes About Results

Negative attitudes bring negative results.

And so far, their most recent results had been perfect. Their meetings in Germany and Switzerland had gone brilliantly. The testing done in their laboratories there was even more rigorous than what had been done in the States. They were sure now. It was safe. They could move ahead to Phase One Human Trials, as soon as the FDA approved it, which meant giving low doses of the medication to a select number of willing, well-informed subjects, and seeing how they fared.

The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you.

If you're humble before the numbers, the rewards are significant.

to frame the decision, asking questions about the data and the methodology, working to understand the results, and using them to improve outcomes for your organization.

Thinking in a concentrated manner to define desired outcomes is something few people feel they have to do. But in truth, outcome thinking is one of the most effective means available for making wishes reality.

What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results. —Peter F. Drucker

In knowledge work … the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is

Talk does not cook rice. —Chinese proverb

Getting Things Done is not some new technology or invention—it simply makes explicit the principles at work within what we all do implicitly. But with that awareness, you can then leverage those principles consciously to create more elegant results.

In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.

As Peter Drucker wrote: "In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved."*

A pretty accurate rule of thumb is the people who did the most talk about it the least. The blowhards are the ones who did squat.

Results in the real world came from slow, dogged work, compiling facts and building conclusions and deductions based on those facts. And a little luck never hurt either. A

When both introducing and sustaining change, leadership matters. The organization needs to see that you, personally, are taking this seriously. As we rolled out HOS, I talked about its importance for our business at every opportunity. I held regular meetings to make sure we were actually implementing it and that we were getting the results—something I didn't do for Six Sigma, and a reason it underdelivered.

Finding and Fixing the "Hidden Factory" 1.?Map out your existing process step by step from beginning to end. 2.?Map common workarounds in case of problems. 3.?Optimize your process and involve end users. 4.?Confirm that the new processes are more efficient and improve results for end users.

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.

Great leaders, I came to believe, challenge themselves and others to understand their businesses better and rethink them so that they can achieve two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. That same intellectual discipline—that mind-set of rigor and curiosity—allows leaders to master what is arguably the most important conflict of all: attaining strong short-term results while also investing in the future to achieve great long-term results.

After hearing our presentation, audience members would raise their hands and ask, "So, what was the single big thing you did to achieve these great results?" "Well," I said, "there was no single best practice. It was a mind-set of intellectual rigor we had adopted that made the difference. It's this mind-set that you should be striving to replicate in your own organization.

In spite of its limitations as a tax-efficient investing vehicle, on an after-tax basis over the two decades of the Arnott study, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund bests the average mutual fund by 2.8 percent per year. Only 14 percent of funds, as shown in Table 7.6, post superior after-tax results, winning by an average margin of only 1.3 percent per year. Losers, much larger in number than winners, lose by a greater margin, posting a 3.2 percent per annum after-tax deficit.

By operating in the institutional mainstream of short-horizon, uncontroversial opportunities, committee members and staff ensure unspectacular results, while missing potentially rewarding longer term contrarian plays.

Market timing fails to make an important contribution to institutional portfolio results, because investors quite sensibly show reasonable constancy in holdings of various asset types.

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

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.