Michael Lewis Quotes

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely.

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

In business, you try to minimise risk.

I don't think I ever take huge risks, though I'm not scared of doing so.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

We tend to ignore the high probability of small gains or losses and focus on big payoffs or disaster despite remote odds.

If we're going to acquire, what are we going to do differently? We came up with six rules of thumb. Whenever I've violated two of them, I usually get into trouble.

I'm the CEO; I'm the one who should be looking out for risk.

One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don't be the first guy through the door because you're going to get all the arrows.

We necessarily operate in an environment in which there's a great deal of uncertainty. In such an environment, it makes sense to use a risk-management approach to identify and avoid the big mistakes. That's one reason I favor a cautious approach.

Managers can make themselves look strong by selling or dropping players, but if the move doesn't work, the choice looks flawed.

In sports, especially skiing, you have to be comfortable with risk. You have to have a relationship with fear, and it can't dominate the decision-making process.

In the media business and as a creative executive, if you don't take risks, you're dead in the water. Calculated risk-taking is essential for success.

Being a Navy SEAL and sniper taught me all about risk management. Take away all the risk variables under your control and reduce it to an acceptable level. The same fundamentals apply in business.

I have to do a better job of picking the spots where I want to attack and picking the right moment when I need to attack.

I wanted to do a lot of things in wine, but I didn't know how to do it. So before I invested in anything, before I really put my dollars into it, I put my whole heart, soul, mind into it so that I really understand the severity of each outcome, the severity of success and the severity of failure.

The two great risks are risking too much but also risking too little. That's for each person to decide. For me, not risking anything is worse than death. By far.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

The pace at eBay was frantic and urgent. We knew that if we didn't move fast, somebody would come into the market and quash us. Participant doesn't make a lot of sense from a financial investment perspective, so it's unlikely that other people will be approaching the business in the same way. So you see less urgency; you see a thoroughness and willingness to spend extra time to get things right. Which I think is really important.

So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.