T. Boone Pickens Quotes
A plan without action is not a plan. It's a speech.
Pickens, T. Boone. The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future. Crown Business, 2008, p. 257.
This is true fir government even more so than business. Politicians tend to focus on policy making and having vision, but most policy visions fail for lack of execution.
When Eisenhower first use this verb, many criticized him for his poor use of language. There was no such word at the time. Purists pointed out that something was final or it was not. There could not be a process of “finalizing”. Yet Eisenhower, with more experienced than most people developing at developing plans. He knew that in every large planning effort, there was a stage where the big decisions had been made and the plan details had to be amended to be consistent with the final decisions. When he called the process “finalizing” every person who had engaged in large planning efforts realized that this was an excellent term for a process that was a part of the planning process. To the distress of some grammarians and lingists, the term caught on and was used be virtually all planners thereafter. By the end if the 20th century, it was such a common and useful term that few people realized that before Eisenhower’s presidency the word “finalize” had never been used.
Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chaired the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. As of November 2016, Pickens had a net worth of $500 million.
