Pete Gallego Quotes

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

The military budget must reflect the threats we face, rather than the budget defining those threats.

When you start to look at completing the development of a modern professional army, when you talk about maturing a democracy, when you talk about development and the economic conditions that have to be addressed, a decade is not too short a period of time to talk about.

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

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

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research.

We need to stop thinking about infrastructure as an economic stimulant and start thinking about it as a strategy. Economic stimulants produce Bridges to Nowhere. Strategic investment in infrastructure produces a foundation for long-term growth.

You can't base an industry solely on one person. That's a very vulnerable business strategy.

I know how to make stuff happen, how to create wealth, create jobs, create investment.

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

I understand all the problems for the Ministry of Defence, of course I do; working within a budget and trying to do so many things is not easy.

Any manager can do well in an expanding market.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

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

And to do that not only for the war fighter, but also to help prepare the people in the acquisition, personnel and policy worlds who need to make adjustments in the department's business, which itself may take 10 or 15 years to accomplish.

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

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.

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

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

Nation building cannot be done on the cheap.

The United States in 2001 is faced with a growing, almost dizzying disparity between its diminished capabilities and the burgeoning requirements of national security.

My priorities are going to be to play a very balanced role in the sense that I have to keep an eye on the challenges in the environment. At the same time, I have to keep an eye on the optimism that is there for India.

Our national-security strategy must drive our military budget, rather than the budget setting our strategy.