Life & Wisdom Quote by Phil Crosby

Authority is a navigation system, not a personality trait. Phil Crosby’s line lands because it flatters the audience while quietly indicting the speaker: attention isn’t a gift people owe you; it’s a loan they extend when they sense direction. In a culture that treats charisma as the whole game, Crosby reframes the real currency as trajectory. If you can signal a destination, people will tolerate detours, complexity, even boredom. If you can’t, every sentence feels like unpaid labor.

Crosby came out of the quality movement, where “knowing where you’re going” isn’t motivational poster talk; it’s process discipline. Quality management lives and dies on clear requirements, measurable aims, and feedback loops. Replace “audience” with “customers” or “employees” and the quote still works: people commit when the goal is legible and the path feels intentional. The subtext is that confusion is contagious. When leaders improvise their way through priorities, everyone downstream starts hoarding attention, time, and trust.

The sentence also contains a subtle performance note. “Know where you are going” is less about having a perfect map than projecting a coherent arc. Audiences forgive uncertainty; they punish drift. Crosby’s intent reads like practical ethics: don’t ask people to follow you into fog unless you can at least name the mountain. In meetings, presentations, and institutions, attention is the first metric of quality control.