Benny Gantz Quotes

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.

One of my strongest assets is my ability to be calm under pressure.

I used to spend my time more on process than strategy. Now, I prioritize my time around strategy, people, and process.

You could be in the United Nations office all night every night and still feel like you were not making a sufficient dent in the world's problems. I think the key is prioritization. But every job presents the tyranny of the inbox, of allowing the urgent to crowd out the important. So we have to have our lodestars.

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.

The key things I learned as a hospital administrator are to be organized, communicate, and be flexible.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

One mediocre general is better than two good ones.

Decisiveness is the best way to get things done.

As Secretary of Defense I have to be cautious and prudent.

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

That's part of being President. You can't focus on any one thing to the exclusion of all other things.

If I come in, and you're an employer, and I say, 'Well, I was a sniper in the Marine Corps. Do you have any sniper positions open?' 'No.' But if I told you that I was good at communication, good at leadership under stressful environments, team management, personnel management, leadership, being prompt, are stuff that I can bring to the table.

Commanders-in-chief make really tough decisions.

A general in time of war is constantly bombarded by reports both true and false; by errors arising from fear or negligence or hastiness; by disobedience born of right or wrong interpretations, of ill will; of a proper or mistaken sense of duty; of laziness; or of exhaustion; and by accident that nobody could have foreseen. In short, he is exposed to countless impressions, most of them disturbing, few of them encouraging. ... If a man were to yield to these pressures, he would never complete an operation.

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good.

Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent.

I walked in and inherited a management group that I didn't know very well. They didn't know me, and we had a very short window to put together a credible recovery plan.

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.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

Too many managers manage by what the postgame press conference is going to be.