Seth Godin Quotes

As a collegiate, I think you spend 50 percent of your time recruiting. It is a distasteful process.

Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

I think one of the things about Donald Trump that's interesting is he lives in a rarified atmosphere where it's possible that he doesn't get enough feedback, enough people rolling their eyes at him. It's a danger more in show business than it is with wealth.

It took me a long time to get selected as an astronaut. In fact, I applied for 20 years before I was selected.

A company is only as good as the people it keeps.

Often, the pressure of the business and fear of having an open position encourages us to hire people who are either not right for the job or not ready to take on the responsibility.

Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving.

In business, the market gives you feedback in real time. Your sales figures tell you what's working, what isn't, and how you need to change. If you don't listen to the feedback, you go belly up. In philanthropy, there is no market.

It's not a very high failure rate if you choose people that you really like the sound of.

I love this company. I don't know how it was selected. It's a bunch of machers. They mean business.

You just have to hope that they'll grant you an interview.

Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee.

One of the major jobs of the Harvard president is to choose the deans. I've had the opportunity to choose a considerable number of deans already, so I've learned a lot in the process in doing it.

Contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business.

If any applicant has 4 years of high school mathematics and 2 years of college mathematics, hire him. We can always train him for many things we need.

No matter how you hire, ensuring the systems are in place to manage the process will be critical in allowing you to find the right people to carry the standards you set. Don't neglect that duty!

We don't get every kid. We get the ones we are supposed to get. It just kind of plays out that way, and it always has.

After earning my university degrees and working for a few years, I wrote to NASA to request an application package. Seven months later, after I applied, I received a call inviting me to Houston to interview. That itself was thrilling; it meant that I was one of the 100 or so who would be interviewed, chosen from several thousand applicants.

Officers are not fruit. I can't pick them off a tree.

The Obama campaign is one of the greatest examples of what is possible in the brave new world of 21st Century marketing. They did a masterful job of connecting with minds, personalizing messages, refining old and new media, sending clear messages, and providing the feedback that enabled them to respond to the messages they heard.

The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.

Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.

The process of competitively selecting contractors to perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all distributed randomly.

The cold-audition process is not a science, so I ignore that.

That's the hardest part of this whole process. The best part is picking the players and the worst part is telling basically five players they are not going to play tonight.