Sandra E. Peterson Quotes

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

What gets measured, gets done….Results measurement is now mainstreamed

What I learned from Rockefeller that's off-the-hook important is: You need to know exactly where you stand in a business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.

There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them.

If you're going to be successful, you better have a goal, you better find really good people, better understand where all the money's coming from. And you better measure the living daylights out of it.

I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don't like surprises. I don't even like good surprises.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

Strategic Work is all about the big questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Tactical Work is all about answers: This is the system we use to do each task. This is how we do it, how we measure it, how we monitor it.

The definition of success is that the company doesn't miss a beat. Do I love what I do? Oh yeah - I love it more than ever. You've got to have that energy level 24/7. But you've also got to make sure the transition is smooth. Being realistic, most high-tech companies haven't done that well.

I think the great part about what I do is that there's a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There's a tangible score.

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.

If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'

The best risk to take is to look to score goals and to play a lot.

In the workplace, we're taught to worry about what happens if we don't have full, complete knowledge of every detail. But if you create a culture and an environment that rewards people for taking risks, even if they don't succeed, you can start changing behavior.

Management always has a big influence on your success, no matter how good or how bad the business is itself.

There has to be active, hands-on management in concert with the manager to lead the organization and make sure that the standards that we set for the organization as a whole are being lived up to.

The signal of the importance of something is whether you're actually measuring it and you're holding people accountable to improving those numbers.

Many who know me or have worked for me are aware of my penchant for strategic planning. I consider it a critical component of the success of any organization and believe in the value of planning for a company's needs over multiple time horizons, as well as reviews against that plan at regular intervals.

You have to be sort of an emotional steward to really get a business to do something hard - to take people up the hill, to conquer the mountain, to sack the city. You have got to be a maniac.

At the end of the day, I write down an 'L' or a 'W,' whether or not the day was a 'Loss' or if it was a 'Win.' It really bothers you to have to write down an 'L.' An 'L' looks like a day I ate a lot of junk food, or I didn't work out when I was supposed to or train when I was supposed to train, or if I felt that I had a bad performance in the ring.

Benchmarking is an ongoing exercise in any company that aspires for leadership.

I think having a visionary CEO is awesome, and visionary leadership is one thing, but you also need checks and balances on whether this company can withstand a very honest and critical look at itself.

Coaching changes are a part of football; they arrive ready to meet the goals they have been set, so you respect them and work with them like any other.

You have to go through a process, but you have to understand, if your objective is to win the World Series, we may not be winning it in 2017 or 2018, but that's got to be what your goal is, and you have to have a plan to get there, and you have to know, every step of the way, are you on plan - on schedule - or not.