Gregory Harrison Quotes

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.

I've always prided myself on doing what really was best for business.

When something becomes a business, 50% of your decisions are what you have to do and not what you want to do.

Spend 10% of the project budget making sure you understand problem, the key technologies involved, and have looked at all of the options before you dive into the detailed design.

Everyone has a budget, I don't care who you are.

Spending a few hundred million dollars more a year on evaluations could save tens of billions of dollars by teaching us which programs work and generating lessons to improve programs that don’t

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

Austerity [in the Defense Department] meant that risks had to be managed, not eliminated.

We have multiple challenges competing for finite resources—–and grotesque uncertainty with regard to the military budget.

I'm not going to risk our precious military resources on an ineffective, unproductive mission.

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

The challenge of any business owner is not only to keep the saw sharp, but also to know if you even have a need for such a tool.

When you have to earmark human and monetary resources for such a long time, it starts to hinder your other activities.

In future irrigation schemes, water drainage and removal systems should be budgeted from the start of the project. Unfortunately, adding such costs to the original project often will result in a poor return on investment. Society then will have to decide how much it is willing to subsidize new irrigation development.

What happens is you submit your script with an idea of what the budget might be, and the financier will offer you less than that. In order to do it for less, it means cutting out the art, usually.

We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good... Meals on Wheels sounds great.

I don't tour to make money: I do it because I love it. When I'm putting a tour together, I'm not sitting with number-crunchers, having them tell me I can't do this or that.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

The first thing I learned as a producer is that you have very little control over the life of a project. Anything can stall a film from financing to scheduling to casting. Things fall apart all the time. Don't waste time on something that just won't get made. Try to have as many projects going at one time as you can handle.

We are not frou-frou creative types. We have done both sides of the business and are constantly asking ourselves, 'How are we going to pay for this?' But the criteria is that it must fit with our world.

In business, we use certain principles to measure performance, and I envision applying those principles in the public sector.

Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen?

I've always maintained the basic business principles of keeping it simple, doing your homework, hard work, and common sense.

All the projects that I am part of get delayed for reasons beyond my control!

The biggest difference between the private sector and public sector is in the private sector, there's a sense of urgency because you have customers and you have competitors. Whereas in government, one of your major objectives is to not make any really big mistakes.