John Baldessari Quotes

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

You cannot keep doing the same things. According to the situation, your role changes in one-day cricket, especially in a phase like the Powerplay. If I bowl four spells, four times I will be playing a different role.

I wait and take on projects that I think can work.

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.

Even when matches don't work out the way you planned, you've always got to stay strong in defence; it's a matter of willpower and intelligence.

If you're trying to avoid one move that you don't think is going to work out, don't then settle for a different move that maybe doesn't check all the boxes. Be true to the philosophy and understand the bigger picture. There's always another day to fight.

I know Donald Trump as a very adaptive person. In my nearly three and a half decades of being in the military, I've had maybe one, maybe two guys that I've worked for that were that adaptive in combat. He adapts to the great challenges, with his own sort of street smarts and his instincts.

The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?

I've been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn't starving, I was going to eat the next day. I came to Hollywood wanting a career that had longevity, and I wasn't afraid to take risks because I had a dollar in the bank. I wasn't driven by money as much as I was driven by making a successful transition. And I was smart enough to know that I certainly didn't have all the answers and I needed to surround myself with smart people and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail.

You have to stick to your plan. Throwing everything overboard and inventing something on the spot does not make sense. You will never get that from me.

Life is a weird thing because it puts roadblocks in front of you, sometimes you gotta go through it, sometimes you gotta go around it, sometimes you gotta take a pause and look back at what you're gonna do, have a plan.

When the major labels didn't work out the first time around, it taught me not to force things. You gotta let it flow.

I like to read the situation and play accordingly.

Every GM will tell you it's an instinct. It's an instinct to be patient, to react, or act, or not to do anything at all. It just comes. What I can say is you must have a plan and a goal and a way to do things. At the end of the day, it's an instinct. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad.

In some times of the game, you have to be more simple.

One of the difficult things in a high-growth company is that, even with the best intentions, the company moves so fast, and growth happens so regularly. When you move at that rate, you have to be willing to change, and you have to be willing to take advice.

Any time you're in a maze there's multiple ways to get to the end.

The market is full of talk, I prefer facts, which help us win, and to become great together.

The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions. Not me. I don't want to be a manager or a dictator. I want to be a leader-and leadership is ongoing, adjustable, flexible, and dynamic. As such, leaders have to maintain a certain amount of discretion

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.

This idea of having back-up plans is ingrained into us to make us believe that that's the smart thing to do.

If his decision is correct, he will win the battle, even if it lasts longer than expected. If his decision is wrong, he will be defeated and he will have to start all over again-only this time with more wisdom. But once he has started, a warrior of the light perseveres until the end.

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.

You have to stick to your guns and still know when to be flexible. That's something I've had to learn-which battles to fight.