Guido Calabresi Quotes

I am determined to hold on as long as possible, but if I should disappear, I should not have had the time to familiarize my successors with the necessary information.

Quite often, people who build big businesses don't believe anyone else can run them, and you end up with an old rascal in their 70s and no one to take them on. I could name several - and I won't - who put themselves in that invidious position.

We have very strong succession plans across all group companies. But we do not comment on it. The retirement age is 60 years, but it does not apply to family professionals who work in the business.

One of the things we often miss in succession planning is that it should be gradual and thoughtful, with lots of sharing of information and knowledge and perspective, so that it's almost a non-event when it happens.

Why do I need succession planning? I'm very alert, I'm very vibrant. I have no intention to retire.

If you're interested in the job and in the kind of work that's done, you have to have an interest in who's going to fill your shoes.

I don't believe in the coach-in-waiting thing. I don't think that works.

When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

What I'm interested in doing after I get out of the presidency is to make sure that I'm working with that next generation so that they understand you can't just rely on inspiration.

The worst mistake a leader can make is to mentor no one, choose no successor and leave no legacy.

For some people, there is no succession plan. They just leave, and there's no getting over it.

For a leader to pick his own successor is a feudal practice.

Things you never thought were going to turn into something end up being the most important things in your life. You have to learn to not try to control it.

One of the things we're trying to do more of is not just take money from corporate partnerships, but get more involved in the business side for when I retire. So Puma are going to make me an ambassador for life. I have a clothing line coming out. I am investing a lot in housing in Jamaica, buildings for rent.

[Retirement] is a dangerous experiment, and generally ends in either drunkenness or hypochrondriacism.

You must prepare yourselves, young people, because Uncle Dave's generation is getting old. We are almost ready to go to the retirement home to spend the rest of our days tapping our bedpans rhythmically in time to "easy listening" rock 'n' roll. We must pass the torch on to you, and you must grasp it, ideally by the end that is not on fire.

The question Tony Blair should be reflecting on this weekend is having achieved this, having secured his place in the history of the Labour Party and the history of Britain, whether now might be a better time to let a new leader in who could then achieve the unity we need if we are going to go forward.

Life can be very deep, but I'm trying to stay at the shallow end.

Tony Blair has to consider very carefully to what extent he can leave Britain, the party and the nation guessing as to when exactly he might go.

Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

The highest manifestation of true leadership is to identify one’s replacement and to begin mentoring him or her.

If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.