• quality people
• insightful thinking
• great execution on details
• just enough time

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Leonard Bernstein

“Yes . . . Damn!” effect, as it’s been dubbed by Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch Jr., who are professors of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Colorado at Boulder, respectively. This occurs when we agree to a future commitment in the belief that we’ll have more free time later than we do now — and then, when it comes due, discover we still don’t have time for it.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/procrastrinating-pleasure/

from http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/arming-the-donkeys/id420535283

This concept helps to drive accountability, and combat diffusion of responsibility

http://genecloud.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/diffusion-of-responsibility/

“Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when has asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: the locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn’t have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. “When you’re the janitor”, Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “ reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.” That “Rubicon, “ he has said “ is crossed when you become a VP.”

quote from Fortune on Apple

“The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that if authors could infuse their stories with enough "semblance of truth," readers would suspend their disbelief of the clearly fabricated tale.”

and advice on using suspension of disbelief in convincing others in business and life;

“In order to inspire others and convince them to suspend their disbelief, you must celebrate, through language, the idea above yourself. Treat the idea as if it were a character you were embodying on the stage. Compelling others is "a function of your capacity to imagine and to subsume one’s own ego in favor of whatever character or idea it is that you’re trying to portray," says Wright. "The idea becomes larger and more powerful than you and there is then hopefully some type of levitation that happens and the story touches people."

http://bigthink.com/ideas/38129

http://www.trendwatching.com/tips/

“Above all, we must abolish hope in the heart of man. A calm despair, without angry convulsions, without reproaches to Heaven, is the essence of wisdom.”

Alfred Victor Vigny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_de_Vigny

"In the old days, again, we were talking about the golden hour – you had to catch the player in the golden hour to get them to love it enough and tell their friends and whatever. These days it’s more like the golden 15 seconds," he commented. "You can actually watch the little waterfall graph of the longer the bar goes for loading, the more people you lose forever for first time players.”

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/zynga-on-why-triple-a-developers-fail-at-social-games/