Below you will find a series of original quotes I’ve developed and used in various circumstances. Some of these have gotten rather broad traction and I occasionally hear them being used by senior business leaders, coaches and innovators. You will find these and new ones I might post in the future added here and via the #sluzewskiquotes Twitter tag.

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“Let others eat their own dog food. We prefer to drink our own champagne.” (circ. 2008)

Why would “dog food” be the metaphor of your product or service? Unless you’re really in the canine gourmet business, how this analogy is supposed to create affinity to your endeavors continues to boggle me. Doesn’t champagne more illustriously capture the pride you have in your venture?

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“There is no goal line on the road toward innovation, only more and more frequent mile posts on the way.” (2012)

So true. Innovation is a place and time that gest continuously pushed forward. The moment you think you’ve captured it, it sets new goals and challenges, defying all laws of beginning and end. And it does so at an accelerating pace.

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“A true leader can see the glass half full even when the emptiness that fills the other half is full of toxic gas.” (2013)

Its easy to be an optimist when all stars are perfectly aligned. But it takes determination to maintain an optimistic posture when faced with adversity. That is the marker of a true leader.

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“Truth lives in silence. Beware of those who claim to speak the truth.” (2016)

The only way to hear the real truth is when volume is down to zero. Only then can the imperfections of language and impurities of human intentions be cleansed from truth’s real meaning.

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“Some will construct strategy one element at a time. But strategy elements are like notes in a musical composition. Play one note and you hear a tone. Play a sequence of articulated notes and you hear the story. So too it is with strategy. One element can never reveal the entire strategy composition.” (2020)

We sometimes attempt to assess the effects or impact of a strategy in the midst of its execution. We should first attempt to appreciate its full breadth and understand how its elements fit into the overall strategy canvas (i.e. composition); only then can we see the contribution each element makes into the overall strategy.

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“Unforeseen disasters and the disruption they cause motivate us to come up with solutions which otherwise we would consider as overly bold or unattainable.” (2020)

“Developing strategy in predictable times follows an algorithmic discipline – you analyze the clues and apply them toward actions. But strategy for turbulent times has few algorithms to follow and tasks us in ways unique to the human kind. (2020)

“On the other side of a crisis, for the same mitigating action you can be remembered as either a problem solver or an opportunist; all depends on the level of empathy which motivated your action.” (2020)

“First, imagine the future, then place yourself there and pull events and their outcomes toward you. If you push tasks toward your imagined future, you will make decisions along the way which may steer you toward an outcome different than the one you had imagined.” (2020)

“There is an irrational fear of having jobs replaced by machines and AI. But think about it – in retrospective, are we not all descendants of unemployed farmers?” (2020)