Mark Vonnegut Quotes

Teams really take into account character.

I want my team to have my personality: surly, obnoxious, and arrogant.

A team will take on its manager's personality. If it's a laid back manager, you'll have a laid back personality. The players will see that if it's OK for the Manager to be laid back, then you'll have a laid back team.

In my experience, nice guys are boring, and bad guys are fun to play.

I think great bosses hire great people. 'A' people hire 'A' people, but 'B' people hire 'C' people; they're worried they might be shown up... they're concerned that that person might make them look bad.

There are lots of colleagues for whom I have a great deal of personal affection. But they’re not necessarily the people I go do to get something done.

Previous experience, key skills, and education. They're undoubtedly all important things you consider when filtering through applicants in order to make a new hire. But, what's another major determining factor of whether or not that hopeful interviewee deserves an offer letter? Cultural fit.

I want to go a team where it'll be challenging for me.

When I jumped ship from Roush Racing to Hendrick Motorsports, I couldn't believe the amount of personnel here that get along with each other. It's pretty amazing that there are so many people under one roof, where Roush is more spread out and it feels so different.

Most of the people that work for me are my friends, and I'd like to keep it that way.

In the changing-room, I'm seen as one of the jokers. I like to have a laugh; there are quite a few of us. That what helps make a good atmosphere in the changing-rooms. You've got to have a few jokers but obviously serious when the time comes.

I don't hire people who have to be told to be nice. I hire nice people.

I don't think I am very easy to work for because everything has to be just right or we don't put it out. But at the same time, all the people that work for me have a "no asshole" rule, if you're a jerk you're fired, so it's a great team and a lot of skillful people at the top of the game, anybody from management to the agents to the publicists to the day-to-day website stuff and it's just a great team.

You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.

The thing it taught me was that winning's a helluva lot more fun than losing. It also taught me that the team with the best players that worked together the best wins.

Every season is so much different and you go through your ups and downs, you figure your team out, you get to play against great teams. Some of the best competition there's been since I've been in the league. Just every night, night in and night out we get to play against the top guys, the top teams. It's a lot of fun.

A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

When you're working, nobody's a star. We're all just actors trying to figure it out.

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

Anyplace of work where you have a cross section of work, you have mini-ecosystem. A little representation of what the planet is. You have the Alpha Dog. You have the young ones, the old ones. The pissed off one. The quiet one.

The most important thing is team morale.

Lionel Messi is very much the team player, while Cristiano is very ego-driven.

The other girls [in team] have experience. They've been competing on a lot of international world-class stages. They knew what to expect and what to do and what not to do. Me and Aly [Raisman] just gave them advice on the media side. We said, it's gonna be crazy. It's the Olympics. But it's gonna be fun!

The biggest message I've given our team, and I think it's really important, is first of all, no one can take away what happened last year. It's obviously a fun year, a terrific year. But I think a big mistake would be to try to compare themselves or ourselves to last year's team. I think the key really is, and I told them this: for you as a group, you're a different team.

Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.