Jon Taffer Quotes

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

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.

The press secretary who starts to narrow down or close the president's options because he answers delicate negotiating questions no longer serves the president.

People must be realistic when evaluating their business.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.

A man's mind will very generally refuse to make itself up until it be driven and compelled by emergency.

I've learned with Donald Trump - take him at his word.

What he's really talking about - and I'm speaking for Mike Flynn, not Donald Trump - is that he's saying, essentially, we have to have options. We have to have a lot of options. And, frankly, we do. We do have a lot of options.

True leadership knows not to go to extremes but knows how to confront and appreciate challenges.

Since retiring from the FBI in 2007, I've traveled the world and worked with everyone from CEOs to their managers and everyday workers on how to apply techniques from hundreds of high-stakes, life-or-death negotiations to business negotiations.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

Just like football, business is a game of inches, where the smallest advancement or advantage can mean the difference between winning and losing.

In my years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: Hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.

My experience in decision-making has shown that patterns are tough to break. In the military, we study an opponent, looking for gaps, flaws, or weaknesses that can be exploited. Successful leaders at all levels in all disciplines conduct this kind of analysis.

Every time I go out there, I just try to find the weakness of my opponent and then use that to my advantage.

Sometimes, the decisions have to be taken in minutes, even seconds, and there would be no time to make the right decision. We understood that this could have ended in catastrophe.

Business is like tennis. Those who serve well win.

The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.

In Washington, as we learned from the White House transcripts, a president may speak of kicking butts, call a problem a can of worms, decide not to be in the position of basically hunkering down, anticipate something hitting the fan, propose to tough it through, sight minefields down the road, see somebody playing hard ball, claim political savvy, and wonder what stroke some of his associates have with others.

An effective leader develops the ability to correctly identify the pertinent detail or details - incidentals in a market, industry or sport that might create an incremental advantage.

When asked, -How is that you pick better moves than your opponents?, I responded: I'm very glad you asked me that, because, as it happens, there is a very simple answer. I think up my own moves, and I make my opponent think up his

They are in a dilemma, they are in trouble now. Hate them and strike them.

The issue of managing through a crisis is you have to be decisive even if you don't have perfect information.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.