Astro Teller Quotes

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

In my opinion, the most important thing in governance is management control.

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas.

Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

If you run a business, if you are responsible for a lot of people, you come to grips with the reality that you have to have discipline. You have to protect the enterprise in order to take care of the employees. So, therefore, you can't be wasteful. You can't squander things, or you jeopardize other people.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

Failure to subject the project, especially in its latter frenzied stages, to a cold and objective appraisal by the best operating talent available, particularly by those not involved in the operation Failure to advise the president, at an appropriate time, that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore canceled Failure to recognize that the project had become overt and that the military effort had become too large to be handled by the agency alone

One of the challenges of a good policy is trying to figure out what your priorities are.

As Secretary of Defense I have to be cautious and prudent.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

No agency … wants an issue on the agenda unless it has an efficient and acceptable solution for it.

It is most difficult to deal with. There are so many plans, so many schemes, and so many reasons why there should be neither plans nor schemes.

It is axiomatic in politics that the earlier one addresses a problem, the more the alternatives and the easier the solutions.

Issues like security threats, declining traffic, high insurance premiums, rising fuel costs, among others, call for individual strengths to be aligned towards regional stability.

When you're the CEO, you take responsibility.

We necessarily operate in an environment in which there's a great deal of uncertainty. In such an environment, it makes sense to use a risk-management approach to identify and avoid the big mistakes. That's one reason I favor a cautious approach.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.