Paul Polman Quotes

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

A plan is always successful if the plan is good.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

'How' is a great thing to know. 'Why' is the ultimate. I'm the 'why' coach. Why are we doing this? Why are we not doing that? Why is this not working? Those are the things I want to know.

We hope that there will be better policy-making and hope to see projects implemented. We have lots of information that can be used for the implementation of projects.

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

We're going to have to look very seriously at what we're doing right or wrong because we just keep losing.

It is easy to say that something should be done. However to say what, when and how is more difficult.

Ours is a foreign policy that is crisis-focused. The crisis comes and then it goes away, but we don’t make any conclusions about good solutions that should be carried forward—what we get instead of strong analysis is instant experts. These ‘experts’ appear on TV when there’s a crisis, but seldom have any long-term knowledge of the issue.

Critics have their uses. They can crystallize a moment and bring into sharp relief the mistakes that have been made and what must be done to correct them.

Support what works and stop supporting what does not work.

A policy needs a clear goal.

Fotball strategy does not originate in a scrimmage. It is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

Vision without execution is delusion.

Leaders tend to focus on 'what to do,' but the real issue is more often 'how to do it.'

It's important to have a sound idea, but the really important thing is the implementation.

I research best practices and recipes for success and failure to craft personalised policies for my city.

We need to learn what's working and what's not working.

It's one thing to be able to analyze something. It's another to implement it or execute on a vision or even to get a whole bunch of people to rally behind it.

Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.

The core failure of Team Obama is not a failure to communicate, but a failure to comprehend.