Ed Woodward Quotes

The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers.

In order to have your short term policies accepted, you have to have your long term policies understood.

It's easy to be a short-term hero. It is very easy for me to get tremendous results very short term, get that translated into compensation, and be off sailing in the Bahamas. But the goal for this company - and it's very difficult to do - the goal is to follow a four- or five-year process.

I understand that fans think short-term, and there's nothing wrong with that. You live or you die in the short term. But I believe in our system, and when you do that, you don't make knee-jerk decisions.

It's the whole big picture that we have to look at to create an organization that wins over the long term. And to just shoot from the hip on a decision based on winning over a 10-game period. No, that doesn't make sense.

I think long-term, not short-term.

Politicians and the government have become too interested in short-term gains. Of course, if you look at the direct financial returns in the short term, human space flight is expensive. But they need to look longer term.

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

You make the right decision for the long run. You manage for the long run, and you continue to move to higher value. That's what I think my job is.

You can gain a lot of time from an aggressive strategy, but you can lose a lot of time from an aggressive strategy.

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

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader - the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general.

We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future.

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.

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

There is only one conflict, and that’s between short-term and long-term thinking.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt always had a wider point of view, of necessity, than I did.

I am not going to opt for a short-term view for a 206-year-old institution like the SBI.

I think in terms of 20-year horizons.

I tend to think year-by-year and tournament-by-tournament.