John S. Middleton Quotes

You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.

What I learned from Rockefeller that's off-the-hook important is: You need to know exactly where you stand in a business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

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

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

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.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

I think the great part about what I do is that there's a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There's a tangible score.

The objective is to be competitive from March onwards.

If the short-term decisions you make damage the long term, you should resist those. But there are many short-term decisions that you need to make to be a successful manager.

When there's a rule that you can use only three engines for the whole season, and you are a team that is not worried about 2018, you are worried about being world champions in 2020, you need to make progress.

Planning defines the particular place you want to be and how you intend to get there. It's a responsibility rather than a technique.

As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.

That's the problem with so many organizations around entrepreneurship. They're driven by metrics that don't matter.

One thing I've tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

One of my philosophies of building companies is the importance of velocity.

No matter what, the entrepreneur must strive to be above average and, at the same time, understand what is driving those averages they are seeking to beat. Take the time to understand and test the metrics you are using, and then you can not only set the average, you can exceed it.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.

I tend to think year-by-year and tournament-by-tournament.

All the big clubs set their goals. We have to do that because it is necessary to explain to the fans. But this does not mean I am thinking only of the final results. The work you are doing every day with the team is often more important.

I don't believe in projects of more than three years.

This is pool. This is setting up your next shot, and I always want to make sure when we're setting up San Antonio's next shot we have a good shot at making sure that we continue to build our infrastructure in such a way that San Antonio will be a player for years to come in national defense issues.

We know our future's not guaranteed, so every day, we have to relentlessly pursue additional actions to drive our competitiveness.