Gordon Gould Quotes

One way a collaboration can go wrong is if your connection is inauthentic or overly prescriptive.

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

You don't want to get too ahead of yourself and go out thinking you can play stadiums every night, and they end up being about half-full.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

Over my career, I'd watched senior leader visits have unintended negative consequences. Typically, schedules were unrealistically overloaded and were modified during the visit to cancel parts of the plan.

It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.

Keep the team as small as possible. Having been on several of these mega-projects, they seem to grow magically. People are attracted to the project like moths to a flame.

In my business, you have so many things going at once - TV shows, projects, movies - and sometimes, things never actually come to fruition.

This is the weirdest thing. I've been told one thing, that all these guys turned me down, x, y, z. I take to Twitter and some of these guys are like, 'Yeah, I'll take the fight,' then you don't hear anything of it for the next few weeks.

I think projects often fail because people do not have a clear understanding at the start what they are trying to deliver.

The worst enemy of coaches is expectations.

It has happened many a times where I have taken a project and wasn't happy about it.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

Projects are usually undertaken to either solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. The probability that the project - even if precisely executed - will complete on time, on budget, and on performance is typically small. Project management is utilized to increase this probability. So in a sense, project management is risk management.

When the only thing you look forward to in life is lunch, you know you have had your just desserts, and it is time to call it a day.

When you fail to communicate, there are gray areas. And when there's gray areas, then bad things happen.

My problems with 'Bonanza' were problems of communication. What we discussed would be, never was. I thought it would be a sophisticated show. Instead it never went beyond the comic strip level.

I hate disappointing people and letting people down.

Sometimes I make certain assumptions but find they're not immediately obvious to my players.

When you take a director off a project, that makes a person feel humiliated because everyone knows it. But we're responsible because we put them in that position.

My twenties were a write-off.

You know you can't satisfy anybody.

With every inch of my energy, I wanted Fyre not to happen. I put all the electricity and energy in my body against that thing happening.