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Dear Reader, This is a collection of thoughts that have been useful to me and my teams over the years whose origin is: 1. Me and/or 2. Things management/colleagues have
said to me and/or 3. Popular quotes for which I have given
no attribution The viewpoints expressed in this material are my own.
Steve Rubinow, Ph.D.
Doctrine of Completed Staff Work: If you were the boss, would you be willing to approve the work you have prepared, and stake your professional reputation on its being right? If the answer is negative, take it back and keep at it because it is not
yet completed staff work
Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan; assigning blame is wasted energy; use negative events as learning for the future;
try hard not to repeat the same mistakes – make new ones
If another expert would have made the same decision you made at the time, even if it turns out badly, it’s unfortunate but excusable; if a better decision would have been made at that
time by another expert, that’s harder to excuse
Assess, take and manage appropriate risks; consider regret minimization: what would you regret more – failing or not trying?; it’s more
important to fail at something that matters than to succeed at something that doesn’t
The best risk management tool on a race car is not brakes, but steering; the same is true for business
Don't mistake activity with achievement; do not confuse motion and progress – a rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress
It will give you a competitive advantage It will increase your revenues It will lower your costs It will reduce your time to market It will improve your quality It will increase your productivity It will increase customer satisfaction It's an industry standard It's a best practice…
Professor Marvel, what are the benefits of your proposal?
All that glitters is not gold (or worthy of funding without more than platitudes)
When someone tells you about a dramatic change, what is the threshold for “drama”? Data, not adjectives
I’m pleased to report there has been a dramatic improvement in…
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are; our assumptions are our windows on the world - scrub them off every once in a
while, or the light won't come in
Forecasting is difficult, especially if it’s about the future; the best way to predict the future is to invent it
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth; no plan survives contact; always have a Plan B
…keep things simple: a designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away; everything
should be made as simple as possible but not simpler; this applies to meetings too!
Better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong; if you make a decision with less than 40% of the needed information, you’re shooting from the hip – if you wait
until you have more than 70% of the information, you’ve waited too long
Creativity is just connecting things…a lot of people haven't had very diverse experiences, so they don’t have enough dots to connect