Jessamyn West Quotes

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

Show me any top entertainer or top business executive, and I'll show you a guy who has mapped out his life from the very start.

I'm very much a creative person, but you've got to do the follow-through. A lot of people start out with an exciting thing and they want to take over the world, but really the people who do take over the world have a good plan of how to get there and the steps along the way.

The thing that I learned early on is you really need to set goals in your life, both short-term and long-term, just like you do in business. Having that long-term goal will enable you to have a plan on how to achieve it.

Sound strategy starts with having the right goal.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

Vision without execution is delusion.

Without execution, 'vision' is just another word for hallucination.

You can have X's and O's, you can have talent, but if you don't have a vision, it won't work.

Build and they will come’ is not a strategy, it’s a prayer.

Personal excellence can be achieved by a visionary goal, through planning, dedicated execution, and total follow-through.

In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.

We may be very busy, we may be very 'efficient', but we will also be truly 'effective' only when we begin with the end in mind.

Success doesn't sneak up on us; it starts as a dream that we combine with a clear plan of action.

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

I think setting a goal, getting a visual image of what it is you want. You've got to see what it is you want to achieve before you can pursue it.

Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them.

I feel that a great coach is one that has a vision, sets a plan in place, has the right people in place to execute that plan and then accepts the responsibility if that plan is not carried out.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

The success combination in business is: Do what you do better... and: do more of what you do.

We've plotted through the years of how to get to here, where we are now, or we would have never made it.

Leadership is working with goals and vision; management is working with objectives.