Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

A corporate battle cry disguised as common sense, Geneen's line doesn’t just advocate pragmatism; it delegitimizes dissent. “Yesterday’s myths” is a neat rhetorical trap: it turns whatever came before - tradition, legacy processes, even hard-won labor protections - into storytelling, not strategy. Myths are, by definition, comforting fictions. If your objections can be filed under “myth,” they don’t merit debate.

The verb choice matters. “Hampered” suggests not merely slowed but unjustly restrained, as if the past is a dead weight strapped to the company’s ankle. That framing flatters the speaker as the adult in the room: clear-eyed, future-facing, allergic to nostalgia. Then comes the managerial pivot: “concentrating on today’s needs.” Needs are urgent, practical, morally unarguable. Nobody wants to be the person who says, actually, we should ignore today’s needs. The sentence quietly forces a binary: either you’re for decisive action now, or you’re clinging to sentimental nonsense.

Context sharpens the edge. Geneen, famed for his hard-driving tenure at ITT, represents a mid-century corporate worldview where scale, speed, and restructuring were virtues - and where “myth-busting” often meant clearing space for mergers, cost-cutting, and centralized control. Under that light, the quote reads less like a neutral principle and more like a permission slip. It’s the language of change management before it had a name: discredit the old story, define the present as emergency, then move.