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Ken Goldstein Quotes

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Famous Ken Goldstein Quotes

“Pain has an odd way of expressing itself in the acts of business. No matter how many setbacks a leader might experience, there always seems to be a new opaque watermark of endurance testing, invisibly triggered for erratic combustion in each compounding decision. Every CEO in the world knows this, yet few have the good sense to walk away from the table when their cards are hot. Why win in Act Two when a comeback in Act Three gives you a longer biography? Ego is not so much about immortality as it is about demonstrating stately resistance to nightmarish attacks in public forums. Any good smack to the head is a continuity wake up call, or at least another invitation to be interviewed by Charlie Rose.”

“How strange it was that the music people favored defined them in so many ways—what they liked, what they rejected, what stuck with them from their school years, what they kept, what they burned into memory, what they let go. How was it that what they heard in a single decade—for most, their second on the planet—encoded a set of remembrances that stayed with them forever? It was simply commercial output, a business after all, nothing more than that—song factories a few years removed from Tin Pan Alley. It wasn’t Beethoven or Mozart, but it was glue—happy and sad, lived and imagined, the soundtrack of youth became the soundtrack of peoples’ lives.”

“And I’m sure they all played by the rules, just liked I did. By the way, when I got laid off four and a half years ago, the stock of my company was at an all-time high. Our CEO retired. He was paid $70 million. Maybe now that is only worth $30 million. Or maybe in a few years if he plays by the rules it will be worth $130 million. I’ll still be worth nothing. And I won’t have a home or my children. You see why I wonder about playing by the rules? Because I always do. As a result, you’re standing where I sleep.”