Harris Faulkner Quotes

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

One thing I've learned about his business is this whole 'plan thing' - it doesn't work.

I never did get hit, and neither did any of the leaders that I flew wing for.

The army is under orders to defend every place.

I want to find a nice decent job as a helicopter pilot.

I feel very confident that Americans flying in the air are safe and that only under the most dire of circumstances would our pilots ever even request permission to do that.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

I've spent my life as an airplane mechanic, pilot, aircraft manufacturer and airline CEO who never lost a life or an airplane. I am considerate of the risk we take every time we fly. I also know we need to fly and always to improve safety.

Business is not a science; it is not susceptible to experiments that can be controlled and replicated. Everything in business is too unpredictable for that - every business, employee, product, market is different and keeps changing.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

Yes, it's true, I have bought a helicopter. I really like it. I can't fly it, but I plan to get a licence one day.

I admit, I'm suspicious of any career planning that involves chasing the next 'big thing,' just because it's so hard to predict what the next big thing is going to be a couple of years - or even six months - out.

There's one thing I've learned about entrepreneurs' business plans. Every one is wrong.

I don't want to be known as a serial entrepreneur. I like doing one thing at a time and making sure that gets my full attention until it's well established. I enjoy the initial years of a company because they are the most dynamic, and that is when I can give the best of myself.

No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time - but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.

We cannot assume that past successes will insure future successes.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

We can't continue to always base our strategy on the fact that the other guy is going to mess up all the time.

In most covert operations … particularly those that have a large paramilitary component, the planning for later stages is very incomplete. The outcome of the first stages of the operation is usually so difficult to predict that it wouldn't have seemed sensible to have planned the later stages. One can plan the first phases, but not what happens next

When you start a military intervention, you do not know what will happen even in the next hour

This is a people-centric system. Planes are guided and controlled by people. We will not compromise on safety.

I'm not going to risk our precious military resources on an ineffective, unproductive mission.