Morning Briefings

The vast majority of business leaders have succeeded not through charisma, but through experience, judgment, boldness, tenacity and hard work.

– Joseph L. Badaracco and Richard R. Ellsworth
Leadership and the Quest for Integrity

If working a room is so much fun and so profitable, why do our hearts thump, our palms sweat and our eyes glaze over when we think about it? One reason is that 88 percent of us think of ourselves as shy.

– Susan RoAne
How to Work a Room: Your Essential Guide to Savvy Socializing

It doesn’t matter if you’re the greatest guitar player in the world, if you’re not enlightened, forget it.

– George Harrison from
Zen Guitar

I try to live my life in such a way that when I die and my Maker asks, ‘Did you live the life I gave you?’ I can honestly answer yes.

– from Marcus Buckingham’s and Donald O. Clifton’s
Now, Discover Your Strengths

When obscurity pollutes someone’s communication, it’s often because the author’s goal is to impress and not to inform. The low road to impressing an audience is to make them feel inferior, by using words they won’t understand.

– Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky
Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide

Besides the earth, man’s principle resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which needs can be satisfied.

– Pope John Paul II

I agree with Siddhartha, our wise friend from the East who once said: ‘Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.’

– Hermann Hesse
Journey to the East

Taxman was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. Are we being punished for something we have forgotten to do?

– George Harrison on the lyrics for Taxman from
I, Me, Mine

Sometimes, it’s the simplest ideas that can change the world, and sometimes it is the most challenging problems that can have the simplest solutions. PlayPumps water system utilizes the power of children playing to achieve a sustainable water supply throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, according to PlayPumps International’s Kristina Gubic.

– As posted by
Guy Kawasaki

It doesn’t matter if you’re the greatest guitar player in the world, if you’re not enlightened, forget it.

– George Harrison from
Zen Guitar