Robert Pozen Quotes

The most important thing is to talk to people that have jobs that you might like and to see what they say the job involves.

If you want an active schedule, you have to husband your time so you can act on the things that are important.

Priorities are the yearly goals that I’m most interested in achieving, then they become operationalized through weekly goals.

You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I’m really against that. You have an incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.

I’m used to being productive, ever since I was young.

Most people get overwhelmed by the insignificant decisions of their lives. I’m urging people to minimize the time spent on these when they’re not critical to their most important goals.

If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite ‘face time’ whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data.

From the law firm’s perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client’s perspective, it doesn’t work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.

You need to agree with your boss about what you need to get done that week, what are the metrics of success. Sometimes you need more hours, sometimes you need fewer hours.

We don’t take a macro view… We’d look at every company to figure out if trade sanctions are helpful or hurtful.

The night before, go over your schedule and see what you’re going to do and what the purpose of what you’re doing is. I advocate having a two-column schedule. On the left, put down all your appointments and phone calls. On the right, put down what the purpose is.

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that’s really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.

No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you can expect to get out of it.

Routinize the routine. The things that aren’t important to you, whether it’s breakfast or your commute, try to do them with the least energy possible so that leaves you with more energy for other things.

The way you delegate is that first you have to hire people that you really have confidence in. You won’t truly let those people feel a sense of autonomy if you don’t have confidence in them.