Graeme Souness Quotes

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

You cannot afford to wait for perfect conditions. Goal setting is often a matter of balancing timing against available resources. Opportunities are easily lost while waiting for perfect conditions.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

You need to decide what problems, what opportunities, what projects you're going to work on.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.

But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done - this was something else again.

You need to carry out very careful pre-feasibility and feasibility studies before you enter any crisis situation.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

I adjust my priorities according to the most important project I'm involved in at the time.

People must be realistic when evaluating their business.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

I either delegate something, I dump it, or I deal with it.

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

I try to choose the projects that I think are the most well-written and well-executed, and the rest of it is so beyond my control to be almost not worth thinking about at all.

I could go insane if I obsessed over every little detail of all of my companies. My management philosophy is to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.

We also have to ask if we focusing on the most important priorities.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

One of the challenges of a good policy is trying to figure out what your priorities are.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

It’s very hard for any administration, and I’ve worked with seven, to focus on any more than one major thing at a time.