Jack G. Downing Quotes

Managers today have to do more with less, and get better results from limited resources, more than ever before.

The biggest reason most people fail is that they try to fix too much at once - join a gym, get out of debt, floss after meals and have thinner thighs in 30 days.

Having stovepipes—not sharing information—that was the main failure of FEMA in Hurricane Katrina.

Old mismanagement is no excuse for the continuance of it.

Frankly, we don't have the resources to go everywhere and do everything.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

The 6 Ps: Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance

The only people who aren’t criticized are those who do nothing, and I would hate to see the agency [CIA] get in that state.

Whoever says we can do more with less is wrong. We will do less with less

The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realized they couldn't do everything.

Doling out punishment constantly [to civil servants] would only cause them to have a mentality of 'the less one does, the fewer mistakes one makes’.

In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail.

… minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

When I served as Prime Minister last time, I failed to prioritize my agenda. I was eager to complete everything at once and ended my administration in failure.

It’s [the CIA] an organization that thrives on deception. How do you manage an organization like that?

The more the government plans fail, the more the planners plan.

For too long the federal government has measured quantity, not quality: What it puts in rather than what it gets out.

The fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited

If you put government in charge of a desert, soon there will be a shortage of sand.

The insistence on a perfect cure often results in no betterment whatsoever.

Vision without execution is delusion.

One cannot advance without mistakes... It is necessary to make mistakes. The party cannot be educated without learning from mistakes. This has great significance.

Execution without a long term strategy leads nowhere. Likewise a long term strategy without execution leads nowhere.

We can already produce Necessaries enough for everybody but we can never produce Luxuries enough; since the desire for them is insatiable.