Paul Martin Quotes

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

You take an educated gamble. If you don't occasionally make a mistake, you're not doing your job.

Never make predictions, especially about the future.

A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

Even when you are right, there are costs and taxes associated with being tactical. When you are wrong, there are opportunity costs.

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.

History is the best guide to the future.

I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

Nobody has a crystal ball, and part of evolving a business plan is to say, 'I might have said we're going left, but I see the opportunity and we're going right.'

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.

Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.

The successful entrepreneurs on the free market will be the ones most adept at anticipating future business conditions. Yet, the forecasting can never be perfect, and entrepreneurs will continue to differ in the success of their judgments. If this were not so, no profits or losses would ever be made in business.

Strategy is, at some level, the ability to predict what's going to happen, but it's also about understanding the context in which it is being formulated. And then you have to be open-minded to the fact that you're not going to get it right at the very beginning.

My job is to make sure a client doesn't have any 'what if's - to make sure, when you look back, you don't say, 'What if I had done this? What if I had done that?'

If you're too methodical, too fearful, you're not going to win. But the clever thing is to make the calculation correctly about where and when to go over the top. You've got to know when to push it and when to come back.

It is not predictions but plans that make the future. If you want predictions, it is because you do not have the ability to make a plan and fulfill it.

You can't look into a crystal ball but what you can say is if money is put on the table and you get half your signings right then you are going to be better next time around.

It's not called quitting if you quit while you ahead. It's about being aware and being strategic enough to know that you got to get out the pool at some point. You got to put your clothes back on and dry off.