2024-12-20

Leadership and Quotations

50 Tips for better Leadership

1.                              Lead by training others
2.                              Never stop learning how
3.                              Master the simple first.
4.                              Look for leadership in others.
5.                              Cultivate the right climate.
6.                              Be faithful to principle.
7.                              Be bouyant.
8.                              Be a good follower.
9.                              Learn to like people.
10.                          Be yourself all the time.
11.                          Earn respect.
12.                          Inspire others.
13.                          Be exciting and enthusiastic.
14.                          Be interested.
15.                          Don't show off authority.
16.                          Be thoughtful.
17.                          Criticize constructively.
18.                          Delegate authority.
19.                          Admit your own mistakes.
20.                          Be firm but fair to everybody.
21.                          Plan programs in advance.
22.                          Study the great leaders.
23.                          Be affirmative and creative.
24.                          Give credit.
25.                          Praise your people publicly. 		26.                          Reprove tactfully.
27.                          Rate fairly -- find a yardstick.
28.                          Be confident.
29.                          Match people to the job.
30.                          Expect the best of people.
31.                          Keep your poise.
32.                          Be active.
33.                          Be humble, but not too humble.
34.                          Be consistent.
35.                          Be gracious.
36.                          Know your organization.
37.                          Be an attentive listener.
38.                          Follow the chain of command.
39.                          Learn from others.
40.                          Be cooperative in seeking answers.
41.                          Keep people informed.
42.                          Respect the work of others.
43.                          Give reasons.
44.                          Talk directly, briskly.
45.                          Compromise, don't appease.
46.                          Be good to yourself.
47.                          Be brave, not brash.
48.                          Cultivate a sense of humor.
49.                          Be dynamic.
50.                          Cultivate moral fiber.

Characteristics to look for while interviewing (MICE):

Motivation
Intelligence
Chemistry
Experience

Quotes I like:

"Offer solutions, and I will help with any problem"   -- Mark Nassi

“Surround yourself with people who know more than you do.” – Joseph Nassi

“Take care of business.” – Sam Nassi

“If you do things merely because someone asks you to do them, and he asks you to do them
because he thinks you want him to ask you to do them, then it will wind up with everyone doing
what nobody wants to do, which in my opinion is a silly state of things.” -- George Bernard Shaw

“People should own both sides of the tradeoff.” – Charle’ Rupp

“Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, (and probably about every kind of creative or professional work). Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve.  A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction.  Enjoyment tracks efficiency.” – Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb." -- Oliver Steele (via Twitter)

"Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" -- Alan Kay

     "The best way to reinvent the past is to reuse it." -- Shel Finkelstein's variation of Alan Kay's quote
    "The best way to predict the future is to let it be" -- another by Shel Finkelstein
    "The easiest way to predict the future is to prevent it ..." Alan Kay

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." -- Ernest Hemingway (grammar aside)

"Do we think, or do we know?" - Gary Loveman @ Harrah's

"In God we trust, all others bring data." - Barry Beracha @ Sara Lee

"Life to you is a dashing, bold adventure." - Chinese fortune cookie

“A good hockey player skates to where the puck is. A great hockey player skates to where the puck is going to be.” - Wayne Gretzkey

"Whatever can be said, can be said clearly." - Ludwig Wiggtenstein

"Does anyone have any questions for my answers?" - Henry Kissinger

"Perfection almost suffices" - Menkin family motto

“Remember that you are not as good as you think you are, and the world is not as bad as you think it is.” - Ḥassidic Rebbe Wolf of Strikov

"It's NEVER tomorrow!"  - Laila Rappaport, at age 5, as told to her two triplet brothers, with great indignation.

"Be yourself. Everyone else is taken." - Oscar Wilde

"Join the Compassion Campaign:

Be Kind To All Kinds
Have a Passion for Compassion
Expect To Respect"
- Rabbi Alan Berkowitz

"Opinions are like assholes.  Everyone has one."  - Dirty Harry

"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." - Yogi Berra

“The future ain't what it used to be." - Yogi Berra

"If nobody wants to come to the ballpark, there's nothing you can do to stop them." - Yogi Berra

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” - Rahm Emanuel


“If you see Silicon Valley as an organism, like with a heart and maybe liver and a kidney, then CHM is the soul of the valley. It's the intellectual place that binds us together and not just through the exhibits, and the location, but CHM has brought together so many great people in so many great conversations, from Edward Feigenbaum and so many others. I believe in this fast living time CHM is the anchor.” - Sebastian Thrun


“Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?   Lipstick!” - Sarah Palin - former candidate for VP


"The time is always right to do what is right." - Martin Luther King Jr.


"I'm increasingly thinking that every functioning system has two forms: The abstraction that outsiders are led to believe, and the reality that insiders actually and carefully operate. You don't incrementally learn a system. You eventually unlearn its necessary lies." - Dean Kaminsky

"Sometimes, Ike, you need an influencing strategy beyond that of pure logic." - Ben Willis

"Do Justly. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly." - Temple Micah, Denver Colorado

"Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great." - Mark Twain

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”—Carl Sagan

“New technologies are fragile, not well-understood, and must be protected.”— Ed Catmull

“Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: “I am a speck of dust,” and on the other : “The world was created for me.” ” — Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa

Jigsaw
by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
from the book "Honey from the Rock"
Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
For some there are more pieces.
For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.
Some seem to be born with a nearly completed puzzle.
And so it goes.
Souls go this way and that.
Trying to assemble the myriad parts.
But know this. No one has within themselves
All the pieces to their puzzle.
Like before the days when they used to seal
jigsaw puzzles in cellophane. Insuring that
All the pieces were there.
Everyone carries with them at least one and
probably
Many pieces to someone else's puzzle.
Sometimes they know it.
Sometimes they don't.
And when you present your piece.
Which is worthless to you,
To another, whether they know it or not,
You are a messenger from the Most High.

"I never lose, I win or learn"-- Nelson Mandela
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."  Albert Einstein (unconfirmed attribution)

Einstein said: "What I admire most about your art is that it is universal. You don't say a word, and yet the world understands you”.
Chaplin replied: "That is true, but your fame is even greater: the world admires you, while no one understands you".

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." -- Wallace Stanley Sayre

"A mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems” -- Paul Erdös

"For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas to the the best versions of themselves on and off the field." -- Ted Lasso

"Our purpose in life is to help others along the way." -- Sandra Day O'Connor (as told to her youngest son, Jay H. O'Connor)

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us” -- Walt Kelly’s funny animal comic strip Pogo

A Timeless Note from Mark Twain About the Jewish People, published in the year 1899 via Humans of Judaism:

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

“the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

In September 2016, Salena Zito, who was then covering voters in the heartland, wrote of then-candidate Donald Trump, in a column for The Atlantic: “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” The phrase quickly slipped into Trumplore. Trump allies, such as Peter Thiel, invoked it to argue that while reporters and fact checkers obsessed over the fine print of Trump’s pronouncements on, say, banning Muslims from the US and building a wall at the southern border, his supporters were hearing more general pledges to, say, reform immigration. Trump critics, such as Dara Lind, then of Vox, complained about the moral and factual slipperiness of such logic—criticisms that were vindicated when Trump moved to literally ban Muslims and literally build his wall almost as soon as he took office. Ever since then, the literally/seriously motif has echoed, Zelig-like, through the press. We’ve heard of Trump being taken seriously and literally, seriously but not literally (by the media this time), and neither seriously nor literally—the latter because, as The Atlantic’s David Frum put it last year, the president’s “words are as worthless as Trump Organization IOUs.”

Reb Simcha Bunem:

It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha-olam—“for my sake the world was created.”
On the other he wrote: V'anokhi afar v'efer”—“I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.

What do these phrases have in common?
  • Never odd or even
  • No lemon no lemon
  • Madam I’m Adam
  • No x in Nixon
  • Was it a bat I saw?



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