Personnel Decisions Quotes

At the end of the day, Coach Belichick does a great job of bringing in people he knows that will fit well.

I think the big thing with Philly is I have such a great relationship with all the personnel decision makers that if there ever does come a day where I am traded or something does happen, it's going to be an open conversation.

I can't very well preach unity and tell the guys we're all in this together and everyone's important, then cut a guy because we might improve by one percent if we bring in someone else.

I was hired to be the head football coach, not the general manager.

I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: "Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him?" But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player.

When you're an engineer, you want to analyze things a lot. But if you believe that the most important data points are people, then you have to make conclusions in relatively short order. Because you want to push the people who are doing great. And you want to either develop the people who are not or, in a worst case, they need to be somewhere else.

I know I was a businessman for years, and I stayed up countless nights worrying about having to let one person go. It's a terrible thing to do.

Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.

The Bears need to let me be GM.

Good leaders must know how to reward those who succeed and know when to retrain, move, or fire ineffective staff.

A leader's most important decisions are about people. Who do you put in which jobs? How long do you leave them in a job?

Managers can make themselves look strong by selling or dropping players, but if the move doesn't work, the choice looks flawed.

There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.

You can control your own destiny a little bit better in college. It's hard to control all the variables, especially with the salary cap and things like that, in pro football. You can't keep your team together, and you are going to have more changes all the time. Personnel decisions aren't always made by you, especially who you bring to your team.

I fired a lot of senior people myself and I think the key, when you feel compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning. Have everybody understand what the rationale was.

I have started or run several companies and spent time with dozens of entrepreneurs over the years. Virtually none of them, in my experience, made meaningful personnel or resource-allocation decisions based on incentives or policies.

It isn't the people you fire who make your life miserable, it's the people you don't.

Become better at firing than hiring - it's crucial for building a business.

Best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team.

I don't drop players. I make changes.

If the president comes forward with a strong, qualified nominee, if he, you know, addresses the agenda, if he takes actions, including dealing with perhaps some personnel decisions, I think that people will show that he is moving forward and doing the right thing for our country.

I think a lot of personnel decisions come down to who's the best player today, like if we had to throw 'em in a game today versus what could their upside be 18 months from now. A lot of times, those are two different answers. That's the difficulty of player personnel.