"If I had said 'yes' to all the projects I turned down and 'no' to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same."—David Picker, movie studio exec, quoted in William Goldman's classic Adventures in the Screen Trade (cited by Caltech physics professor and author Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
NB1: Mlodinow's book gets a 10 out of 10 from me, hanging in with Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (Another fav from Mlodinow: "Mathematical analysis of firings in all major sports has shown that those firings had, on average, no effect on team performance." A dozen or more studies appearing in prestigious academic journals are cited.)
NB2: If Randomness Rules then your only defense is the so-called "law of large numbers"—that is, success follows from tryin' enough stuff so that the odds of doin' something right tilt your way; in my speeches I declare that the only thing I've truly learned "for sure" in the last 40 years is "Try more stuff than the other guy"—there is no poetic license here, I mean it.
Quote of the Day - To learn more about this author, visit Tom Peters's Website.
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Tom Peters
(Visit Tom's Website)
Tom & Bob Waterman coauthored In Search of
Excellence in 1982; the book was named by
NPR (in 1999) as one of the "Top Three
Business Books of the Century," and ranked
as the "greatest business book of all
time" in a poll by Britain's Bloomsbury
Publishing (2002). Tom followed Search
with a string of international
bestsellers: A Passion for Excellence
(1985, with Nancy Austin), Thriving on
Chaos (1987), Liberation Management (1992:
acclaimed as the "Management Book of the
Decade" for the '90s), The Tom Peters
Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy
Organizations (1993), The Pursuit of WOW!
(1994); The Circle of Innovation: You
Can't Shrink Your Way to Greatness (1997);
and in 1999 a series of books on
Reinventing Work: The Brand You50, The
Project50 and The Professional Service
Firm50. In 2003 Tom and publisher Dorling
Kindersley released Re-imagine! Business
Excellence in a Disruptive Age; the
revolutionary book, an immediate No.1
international best seller, aims to do no
less than reinvent the business book
through vibrant, energetic presentation of
critical ideas.
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