Robert Metcalfe Quotes

Studios are an assembly line. They can be a very good assembly line. As a producer, you concentrate on one project at a time. As an executive, you're in charge of a slate.

Parents should monitor their behavior, know who their friends are, and keep track of what they do.

But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.

A woman with organizing skills can run a construction company without ever picking up a hammer and nail.

Currently, I am overseeing the construction of the new Trump Tower in Chicago. I am involved in meeting with the construction crews, architects and sales teams. I am learning a lot and working with some of the best in the business.

In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.

Ask anybody who has ever remodeled their house. There's always problems. They open up walls, they find this, they find that. There is always something. I'm in a business where you have to control those variables.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery? .. It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.

As a studio executive, I took the approach that people are competent until proven otherwise. But when you make a movie, because there is so little time to fix things when they break, you have to almost come to it with the mindset that everyone is incompetent until proven otherwise.

My Dad has been on board for the entire project. He has produced Hello' and made sure that everything is just right this time.

Good parts just don't fall off trees. I try to be very careful about what sort of projects I attack. There's an audience out there that expects high standards from me.

A product can turn bad, not the production. When you start a film, you feel it will be great. But sometimes, as it progresses, it fails somewhere. You can't blame anyone for that. You can blame only your own intelligence!

It's hard to do large, expensive projects without some sort of hierarchical structure where somebody can tell you - maybe softly, but at least tell you - what to do, or you have some supervision over you. Physicists like to be completely independent of each other. So that's a constant struggle. And it's a place that sometimes we get in trouble.

Sometimes you think that a reconstruction project can be done more quickly than you expected.

With a lot of projects, you never know if it's going to be executed properly. And also, you never know if people are going to respond to it.

If transport, housing and Olympic projects do not work, I will crawl away under a stone.

Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are "excellent" and "insanely excellent", depending on whether lives are at stake.

I believe that it is possible for one to praise, without concern, any man after he is dead since every reason and supervision for adulation is lacking.

At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

Who will guard the guards ? If we're the guards of society, then who will watch us and make sure that we're not dangerous?

We're not perfect every time. We make mistakes just like everybody else. But, we stay on top of it, and we stay with it, and we make sure we get it right.

The buck stops with me, but I can tick off dozens of very good senior executives that are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people who work for me.

There is a significant Latin proverb; to wit: Who will guard the guards?

Anything that has the Disney name to it is something we feel responsible for.