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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“After all, parents can shop around for a psychologist just as some Catholics used to shop for a confessor.”
— Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind
Tagged: Psychologists, Secularization, Secularized Theology, Secular Theology
“Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to 'top-grade' their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling of genuine surprise when one receives a good performance review. Managers are so parsimonious with compliments that underlings tend to spend their days anticipating their termination.”
— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Tagged: Amazon, Managment, Performance Reviews
“All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world. In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain — an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius.”
— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Tagged: Business Personalities, Leadership, Power
“We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.”
— Jeff Bezos, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Tagged: Long Time Horizons, Think Big
“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it's easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.”
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Tagged: Reading, Reading Strategies, Reading Vacations, Memory Hacks
“In a company with over 270,000 employees, there are only 23 at corporate headquarters in Omaha. There are no regular budget meetings for Berkshire companies. The CEOs who run Berkshire's subsidiary companies simply never hear from Buffett unless they call for advice or seek capital for their businesses. He summarizes this approach to management as 'hire well, manage little' and believes this extreme form of decentralization increases the overall efficiency of the organization by reducing overhead and releasing entrepreneurial energy.”
—
Tagged: Berkshire Hathaway, Decentralization, Manage Little, Management
“You have to be willing to always ask what the return is and to go forward only with projects that offer attractive returns using conservative assumptions.”
— William N. Thorndike , The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
Tagged: Basic Business, Conservative Business
“Buffett has famously eschewed splitting Berkshire's A shares, which currently trade at over $120,000, more than fifty times the price of the next-highest issue on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He believes these splits are purely cosmetic and likens the process to dividing a pizza into eight versus four slices, with no change in calories or asset value delivered. Avoiding stock splits is yet another filter, helping Berkshire to self-select for longterm owners.”
— William N. Thorndike , The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
Tagged: Berkshire Hathaway, NYSE, Ownership
“On the morning of my forty-second birthday, I got a call from my mother. 'Happy birthday,' she said. 'Remember, your dad was forty-two when he had his first attack.' The men in my family don't tend to grow old. I think about that sometimes, when I see my teenage kids dig through the refrigerator in the kitchen, or hear them talk about summer plans, or even joke about the latest boy to approach one of my daughters at the beach… I wonder about the future whenever there's tightness in my chest when I deal with lawyers and legacy problems from my time with Blackwater... It makes me think about my life's work. Because when it comes to Blackwater, if I had it all to do over again, I'm not sure I would. At the very least, I'd be more selective in the federal departments I worked for. Otherwise, I might just send a note back to 1998 and tell myself to go start my own manufacturing business. Or do something else entirely in a different part of the world— anything, anyplace. I'm still haunted by an incident that involved my accountant: As he escorted a veteran IRS agent around my farm during yet another tax audit, the officer mentioned how in twenty-five years of handling high-profile tax cases, he had 'never been under so much pressure to get someone as to get Erik Prince.' I'm just not sure what good I gained from the path I chose, or what part of America it is that craves that sort of relentless political persecution.”
— Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater
Tagged: Businesses in Retrospect, Capitalism, Health, Heart Attack, IRS
“I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team's vision.”
— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success
Tagged: Ego, Managment, Negotiation, Power Dynamics