Quote collection
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing."
"To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent"
"Providing more desirable products, services, and customer experiences is vital to the continued existence of any business. And that is INNOVATION."
"All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it."
"The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength."
"A business exists because the consumer is willing to pay you his money. You run a business to satisfy the consumer. That isn't marketing. That goes way beyond marketing."
"For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four."
"Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective."
"Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant"
"To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient."
"As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive... The unexpected is usually not received at all."
"Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing."
"The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive."
"Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works."
"Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior."
"The real achiever do one thing at a time."
"Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers."
""Plastic moments" are those periods that overlap when the old has gone but the new has not yet arrived and when the course of history is more open to being shaped and steered than any other time."
"Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it."
"Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves."