“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?” YearsWarThreePeriodsPercentDirectTwentiesTownsSouthPopulationThree YearsBurnedExposureKoreaNorth KoreaStarvationCasualtiesSouth Korea Author:Curtis LeMay
“I went into my own black-out period which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they'd get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn't emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had.” YearsTwoFightingThreeBlackMy OwnPeriodsStonesMessGrayThree Years Author:Lee Krasner
“Value investing strategies have worked for years and everyone's known about them. They continue to work because it's hard for people to do, for two main reasons. First, the companies that show up on the screens can be scary and not doing so well, so people find them difficult to buy. Second, there can be one-, two- or three-year periods when a strategy like this doesn't work. Most people aren't capable of sticking it out through that.” PeopleYearsFirstsWellsTwoHardReasonShowsValuesThreeDifficultCompanyKnownPeriodsCapableStrategyInvestingScaryScreensThree YearsSticking It Author:Joel Greenblatt
“The first three years was our honeymoon period. Then you settle into the relationship, and it morphs into just living, breathing. It becomes more comfortable, but it becomes a necessity - something you can't give up, like an addict.” GivingYearsFirstsThreePeriodsGiving UpComfortableBreathingSettlingThree YearsAddictHoneymoon Author:David Burtka
“There are some pretty obvious ways of benchmarking creativity. One way is to perform what I call a creativity audit, which is to look at your capabilities and look at your performance and examine the percentage of revenue that comes from products that are less than five years old, less than three years old and that are current with the present accounting period. You can then compare those figures to those of your competition along the same axes.” WayYearsLooksThreeCreativityFiveFiguresProductsPeriodsPerformancesCompetitionCurrentsObviousOne WayCompareFive YearsThree YearsCapabilityRevenuePercentagesAccountingFive Year OldsAxesThree Year Olds Author:John Kao
“When you are incubating new ideas, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is very good advice. But when you are seeking to transform your enterprise's portfolio by scaling a fledgling business to material size - say ten percent of total enterprise revenue - then it is imperative that you make that the singular focus of everyone in the enterprise for the two to three year period it is likely to require to reach its tipping point. Expecting to do two such scaling efforts in parallel is simply folly, yet that is what the "eggs/basket" idea is often used to justify.” YearsTwoIdeasUsedThreeEffortFocusAdviceMaterialsPeriodsTenPercentVery GoodSizeSeekingFollyEnterpriseJustifyEggsThree YearsExpectingNew IdeasRevenueParallelsImperativesBasketsGood AdvicePortfoliosTippingTipping PointEggs In One BasketFledglings Author:Geoffrey Moore