Graeme Souness Quotes

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

One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

If you do it right 51 percent of the time you will end up a hero.

Let's face it, making movies is all risk. Most of the time, batting average-wise, the reward does not outweigh the risk.

The more people's money you take to do something, the more inputs you get.

Using a forecasting company is like going to a fortune-teller. If you believe the company and the color does not sell, who do you blame? The forecasters? No, you blame yourself.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Never make predictions, especially about the future.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

Captain Huston and myself have spent over $200,000 in strengthening the Yankees since we purchased the club. We paid $37,500 for Frank Baker; we paid $25,000 for Lee Magee, and we have got rid of a young fortune on other players who couldn't deliver the goods. And we have had some of the most frightful luck I ever heard of.

You can't base an industry solely on one person. That's a very vulnerable business strategy.

The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.

I think there's a difference between a gamble and a calculated risk.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

In my opinion, the most important thing in governance is management control.

Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

My view was that if you're going to make a mistake in your predictions, make sure you make them the right way. Don't put yourself into a situation where, in fact, you say you're going to do something, and then all of a sudden you can't.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.