If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms.

The sun can make you take off your coat more quickly than the wind; and kindliness, the friendly approach and appreciation can make people change their minds more readily than all the bluster and storming in the world.

Businesspeople know that you sometimes have to be exposed to potential liabilities or you won’t get anywhere.

By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.

Pain + Reflection = Progress. There is no avoiding pain, especially if you’re going after ambitious goals. Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress.

With such variation in individuals on the team, the challenge for any leader was to raise the level of every member of the team so that they could perform at their absolute best.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’.

The person with the edge is always in a position to outguess the person without an edge.

The best thing about this whole experience is that the agreement helped me be calm and let them learn. They chose; they got the consequence. I was loving, I was supportive, but I didn’t get in the way.

Leaders must be aggressive but not overbearing