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Most Recent Quotes

1. Clay Shirky - There’s no such thing as information overload — only filter failure.
   
2. David N. Burt - Trust is the basis of agility, of flexibility. Yet it's an incredible challenge to establish trust and maybe even harder to maintain it. Underlying the challenge is the question of how to institutionalize trust between buyer and supplier. I've got colleagues who maintain that trust can only be established between individuals. But a few souls like Robert and myself say we've got to be able to institutionalize trust. We've got to make it work so that when the founders of the alliance depart, the alliance continues. We've been looking at this for over ten years, and we don't have the answer yet.
   
3. David Whyte - Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that aren’t our own become another blur, too.
   
4. David R. Laube and Raymond F. Zammuto - In the past, CRM has followed a basic balanced scorecard technique involving four categories: customer, financial, operations, and people. From an inside-out perspective, organizations first analyzed the needs and capabilities of operations and their people to determine what could be delivered to the customer. From that, they drew conclusions and predictions to determine the impact on the financial category. As this has changed, so have the priorities. Now the focus is first on the customers.
   
5. John Cordier - Every business needs three types of people: Flashlights, who see what is coming and send warnings signals in a timely fashion; Innovators, who pick up those signals and innovate; finally, the Doers, who make it all happen.
   
6. Peter Brabeck - The biggest problem with a successful company is that you don’t learn from success. Learning from failure is so much easier.
   
7. Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor - Only if managers define market segments that correspond to the circumstances in which customers find themselves when making purchasing decisions can they accurately theorize which products will connect with their customers. We believe that customer segmentation (or categorization) should be based on the notion that customers "hire" products to do specific "jobs." Doing so will help managers segment their markets to mirror the way their customers experience life. This approach can also uncover opportunities for disruptive innovation.
   
8. David Whyte - When we work only to do, we most often find ourselves helplessly doing again without having placed the first doing in any context, without having celebrated any accomplishment… Most people who exhibit mastery in a work or a subject often have left it completely for a long period, only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both us and the subject stale and uninteresting.
   
9. John Adams - The way to improve society and reform the world is to enlighten [people], spread knowledge, and convince the multitude that they have, or may have, sense, knowledge and virtue. Declamations against the cunning of politicians and the ignorance, folly, inconstancy, or effrontery of the multitude will never do.
   
   
10. Sigvald J. Harryson - Knowing what we know is less powerful than knowing who knows what.
    

Most Popular Quotes

1. Mark Murphy - Despite the variety of personalities and attitudes out there, you can still roughly categorize people into two groups: the problem-bringers and problem-solvers. When you ask a problem-bringer about a problem, you’ll hear about the problem and nothing more. We’ve all worked with these folks, and you know that they can spend all day telling you about a problem without ever coming close to offering a solution. By contrast, when you ask a problem-solver about a problem, you’ll hear about the problem, but you’ll also hear some potential solutions. That’s because problem-solvers can’t even think of a problem without instantly generating possible solutions. For them, separating problems and solutions is as ludicrous as separating wet from water. And no matter what particular attitude you’re looking to hire, you’ll want that person to have a problem-solver predisposition.
   
2. Philip Delves Broughton - Closing a sale requires two contradictory human qualities: the empathy to understand what the customer is saying; and the ego to reach for their wallet. It is rare to find people who have these qualities in the right balance. Some are too empathetic, and so cannot ask for the money. Others are too greedy and don’t spend enough time listening. Every problem around closing tends to come down to this issue.
   
3. Accenture - In a multi-polar world—a volatile, interdependent, globalized marketplace where upstart rivals can emerge quickly from any corner—competitiveness at speed remains imperative. But many of the previous bases for competition are no longer viable. Companies offer mostly similar products and use comparable technology. Proprietary technologies can be copied quickly. Physical location matters less when customers use the Internet to search and transact.
   
   What’s left as a basis for competition is to gain a deep understanding of customer priorities by individual segment and to make the smartest business decisions possible about serving those segments. In this new environment, companies with weak segmenting and customer insight capabilities will struggle. Companies that master customer analytics will find abundant new opportunities for profitable growth and will be able to make wise decisions about investing marketing resources.
   
4. Michael E. Raynor - because Disruptions necessarily take root in unattractive markets, the quest for innovation can begin by looking not where the money is (the essence of good management) but, rather, where the money isn’t (the essence of good Disruption). Consequently, rather than encourage a wide range of solutions to a host of problems—typically the result of an emphasis on variation—innovation processes can begin by focusing people’s creative efforts on carefully defined opportunities.
   
5. Michael Wagner - Don't wait for perfection, praise progress.
   
6. Les McKeown - I’ve noticed over the years that all leaders exhibit one of three natural leadership styles—what I’ve come to term the “Visionary,” “Operator” and “Processor” styles—and that the most common source of leadership stress occurs when there is a mismatch between an individual’s personal style and the leadership role they’re being asked to perform. For example: a Visionary leader who has been placed in an Operator role; or a Processor who finds themselves having to think (and lead) like a Visionary.
   
   All other things being equal, it’s more often than not this lack of congruence between what is being asked of the leader on the one hand (to be a Visionary, Operator or Processor), and their innate ability to act and think that way that causes stress and under-performance.
   
7. Sophus A. Reinert - We are stuck now, not only in the United States but in many European countries, in a polarized polemic in which pundits and politicians alike suggest to us that the essential question of political economy is one of choosing between planning and laissez-faire, between Stalin and Ayn Rand, between stupidity and intelligence. This is as specious as it is dangerous. The encouragement and regulation of economic life has been a mainstay of civilization since the dawn of written history. There have been periods of dogmatic laissez-faire before, though never on the scale we have experimented with since the 1980s, and it must be said, they have tended to end in famine, bankruptcies, and social unrest. Governmental interventions can of course create much mischief, but they have also nurtured practically every economic miracle we know of, from the commercial revolution in Renaissance Italy to the nineteenth-century USA to South Korea in the 1960s and contemporary China. This does not mean that governments always know what they are doing, far from it, but it does indicate that our debates should be over what sort of interventions and what level of regulation is appropriate in a given context rather than whether regulation itself is a moral good or evil.
   
8. Irene Rosenfeld - In business, we tend to spend a lot more time thinking about the problems than the triumphs. People need to know that what they’re doing is making a difference, and that their leaders notice and appreciate their efforts.
   
9. Stephen Shapiro - When you hire people to work for you, it should be expected that they have a basic level of competence. When you simply recognize people for doing what they are hired to do, it reinforces a culture where the status quo is good enough. If the company is so risk-averse that people aren’t willing to try anything new, while all you do is reward people for doing what they’ve always done, all you’ll get is more of the same.
   
10. Bart van Ark - An economy doesn’t operate by market forces alone—it’s dependent on actions of business and consumers and government. There is a clear role for government in creating an environment in which business gets new opportunities. Yes, government should get out of spaces where it doesn’t have to be and let business do its thing. But government needs to be where there are so-called external effects, which means that additional positive value gets created from investments that businesses don’t make on their own. For example, spending on basic research is often not done by many businesses because they cannot internalize all the benefits from the investment.
    

1. Stephanie Quappe, David Samso Aparici, Jon Warshawsky - As for the genius of innovation, clearly the one percent spark of inspiration is nurtured by a positive culture. But the 99 percent perspiration ingredient comes from employees who love what they do, as well as where they do it, and who invest in that Holy Grail of productivity called “discretionary effort.”
   
2. Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad - In many companies, business unit managers are rewarded solely on the basis of their performance against return on investment targets. Unfortunately, that often leads to denominator management because executives soon discover that reductions in investment and head count—the denominator—“improve” the financial ratios by which they are measured more easily than growth in the numerator: revenues. It also fosters a hair-trigger sensitivity to industry downturns that can be very costly. Managers who are quick to reduce investment and dismiss workers find it takes much longer to regain lost skills and catch up on investment when the industry turns upward again.
   
3. David Garvin and Amy Edmondson - An environment that supports learning has four distinguishing characteristics: psychological safety, appreciation of differences, openness to new ideas, time for reflection.
   
4. Gordon Eubanks (original source?) - Strategy gets you on the playing field, but execution pays the bills.
   
5. Kenneth Boulding - The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior.
   
6. Dan Heath, Chip Heath - The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message-i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audiences' guessing machines.
   
7. Peter Drucker - In the last 40 or 50 years, economics was dominant. In the next 20 or 30 years, social issues will be dominant.
   
8. Geoffrey James - CEOs don't care about product features. (Save it for the engineering VP.) CEOs don't care about ROI. (Save it for the CFO.) What CEOs care about is: "will this increase the value of my company?" and "will this make my company easier to manage?" If you're not selling something that's going to impact one of those two elements, don't bother trying to sell it to the CEO, because you'll just get a one-way ticket to his admin's blacklist.
   
9. John Maxwell - Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
   
10. James Kimsey, '62, founding CEO, America Online - The first lesson I learned as a plebe came from an upperclassman yelling in my face. He told me that there were four acceptable answers: 'Yes, sir'; 'No, sir'; 'No excuse, sir'; and 'Sir, I do not understand.'
    

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