|
|
|
|
|
|
Norman Schwarzkopf
Commander, Operation Desert Storm
Someone once said, you can divide man's work into a calling, like a priest; a profession, like a doctor; a career, where you go from step, to step, to step, moving up a ladder of progression; or just a job, where you walk in every day and sort of punch a ticket. I find, the military is someplace between the calling and the profession. It's something you're identified with, you have a title, like a doctor has a title, and everybody calls you that. And yet, you also have to have this inner drive of service. West Point gave us a creed to live by: "Duty, Honor, Country." And not everybody who graduates from West Point, of course, lives by that creed for their entire life, but I have. I mean, it just became a way of life for me.
View Interview with Norman Schwarzkopf
View Biography of Norman Schwarzkopf
View Profile of Norman Schwarzkopf
View Photo Gallery of Norman Schwarzkopf
|
|
Norman Schwarzkopf
Commander, Operation Desert Storm
You've got to believe in what you're doing. If you don't believe in what you're doing, you're not going to do it well. You truly have to believe in it. You have to believe that you're doing what's right. And I don't think I could go to war -- I mean I don't think ultimately I could serve my country -- if I thought we were doing something wrong. I think I would get out, I would leave. You don't have to stay, you have an alternative. It's not like the German generals who tried to justify what they did at the Nuremberg trials by saying, "I was only doing my duty." That's not right, because you have higher duties. You have a duty to your moral code, whatever it might be. You've got to do what's right.
View Interview with Norman Schwarzkopf
View Biography of Norman Schwarzkopf
View Profile of Norman Schwarzkopf
View Photo Gallery of Norman Schwarzkopf
|
|
Stephen Schwarzman
Chairman and CEO, The Blackstone Group
I've always found, in investment banking, that there's real logic to everything, and I don't understand why somebody else didn't come up with that. They probably would have, at some point, but you know, I've always found -- and I really didn't specialize in doing financings like that. I really did merger things with most of my career, and that's just another derivation of solving problems. In the merger business, there's also the ability to sort of go out on a limb and sort of invent things, sort of creatively imagine "What would this company buy?" before they might even think about it. And then sort of go to them and convince them, and then convince the other side to do something, or negotiation, which is -- you know, a lot of people don't like really being in zero sum games, and you try and make a zero sum game not a zero sum game. But you know, that's your first level of solving of problems. But at the end of the day, if money's being paid, usually it's out of somebody's pocket into somebody else's pocket. So that is a zero sum game at the end of the day, and usually that generates huge amounts of conflict and tension. A lot of people don't like being in situations like that, and for whatever the series of reasons, that didn't bother me. I don't always enjoy it, but it didn't bother me.
View Interview with Stephen Schwarzman
View Biography of Stephen Schwarzman
View Profile of Stephen Schwarzman
View Photo Gallery of Stephen Schwarzman
|
|
Glenn Seaborg
Discoverer of Plutonium
Glenn Seaborg: Not giving up, and as I say, this is a corny word, but hard work. Again, not as a sacrifice. I liked it. It was what I wanted to do. I never thought, my gosh, now I have to go back to the laboratory. That's where I wanted to be. Nevertheless, that's where I was and it was hard work. Working, doing research nearly all of my waking hours. I took time out to go to the movies and dancing. I went to the city where the big bands were playing in those days with girlfriends and so forth, but my number one priority was to do the research and work out the problems and get the results and interpret it and write papers and write review articles and so forth.
View Interview with Glenn Seaborg
View Biography of Glenn Seaborg
View Profile of Glenn Seaborg
View Photo Gallery of Glenn Seaborg
|
| |
|
