That's why I wanted to make sure that our benchmarks were completely international.
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks.
My message to all staff is that Ministers need their professionalism, expertise and dedication if we are to achieve our aims and measure up to our benchmarks.
"If our benchmarks or conditions that we set are contingent on actions by the Iraqis and the Iraqis don't take them, then we are not in control of our own circumstances and our deployments," Mr. Obama said.
We all have our benchmarks and for us the benchmark was the Brink's robbery in Boston in 1950, which was the largest robbery in the United States at that time.
He said: "We are in a situation where we set out to run the marathon but set our benchmarks on a 100m sprint which is not likely to lead to the right strategy".
At the end of each week we plan our benchmarks for the coming week, and we make sure they correlate with our quarterly indicators (one side benefit: this helps us avoid "feature creep" — getting distracted by features we think would be cool but aren't essential).
"We all have our benchmarks," he wrote in The Guardian in 2008, speaking about professional aspirations in general and those of thieves in particular, "and for us the benchmark was the Brink's robbery in Boston in 1950, which was the largest robbery in the United States at that time.
"We all have our benchmarks, and for us the benchmark was the Brink's robbery in Boston in 1950, which was the largest robbery in the United States at that time," wrote the man who planned it, Bruce Reynolds, four decades later.
Maidment: What do you think our benchmarks for success or failure should be?
–The performance of our endowment over the past two years has exceeded our benchmarks.
