Most Recent Quotes
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Andrew Carnegie
- If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
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Michael E. Raynor
- Rather than seeking out contrary or little-understood points of view, many of us need so badly to be told we’re right that we’ll pay people to do it.
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John Wooden
- Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
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John Wooden
- Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
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John Wooden
- I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.
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Patrick Harris
- One way to stimulate a creative mindset is to avoid the typical focus of organizations on what is and to ask, instead, what if questions. Doing this regularly tests your ability to see things anew.
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Don Sull
- There are three different ways frms are agile. They can be agile within their operations. That’s kind of the Toyota story or the Southwest Air story; a clearly defned industry. You’re constantly spotting and seizing opportunities quicker than your rivals.
The second way is through portfolio agility. You can pull resources from slower declining businesses and put them against faster growing or more promising opportunities.
A third category is what I call strategic agility, and that’s seizing the opportunities that arise—golden opportunities that arise every so often. That might be entering the market when the [Berlin] Wall falls or [seizing] the opportunity to buy assets on the cheap, as is possible in many industries right now in the current downturn. It’s the ability to seize those rare opportunities when they arise. -
Ranjay Gulati
- a key distinction for managers to focus on is the one between coordination and cooperation.
Coordination—the ability to work together—involves the alignment of "hard" phenomena: activities, processes, and information. Most companies begin with this and simply assume that mandating shared tasks and information exchange will suffice. It does to a degree but can be severely limiting in how much firms can achieve. At best, they are able to respond in a somewhat coordinated fashion when customers come to them. What they don't get is proactive development of new ideas that can be taken to the market before the market comes to them. To achieve this loftier goal, you need the second half of collaboration, which is cooperation.
Cooperation—the willingness to work together—involves the alignment of "soft" phenomena: goals, attitudes, and behaviors, people-related issues. Most companies focus on coordination among silos and pay insufficient attention to encouraging employees to cooperate. And when they do consider cooperation, they rely too heavily on incentives alone as the panacea. Those who get it right recognize that changing behavior requires a multipronged effort that ultimately shifts the culture of the organization. -
Fernando Flores
- We human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.
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Fernando Flores
- The obligations people create for themselves are stronger and more psychologically binding than the directions they are given by someone else.
Most Popular Quotes
Recent-
Louis Menand
- Knowledge is our most important business. The success of almost all our other business depends on it, but its value is not only economic. The pursuit, production, dissemination, application, and preservation of knowledge are the central activities of a civilization. Knowledge is social memory, a connection to the past; and it is social hope, an investment in the future. The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans. It is how we reproduce ourselves as social beings and how we change—how we keep our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds.
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John Wooden
- Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
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Jim Collins
- Success is constantly a journey. You're always trying to better understand the sources of your success and the things that could imperil you. If you actually think that you have all those answers, you stop asking the questions. Well, what happens if, in fact, you were wrong about part of it? And then things start to go awry because you've lost that inquisitiveness, the will to try to truly understand. You may, in fact, put the accelerator on the wrong variables because you were wrong about why you were successful in the first place. And so I think the sense of a relentless curiosity and a relentless quest to understand ... reflects the way that certain leaders navigated a world that was very foggy.
That's the thing that's so hard, to understand things at the moment. Well, if you have really great people around you to begin with and you ask them the right questions, you're probably more likely to at least have reasonably good answers than if you just assert the statement. ...And it's sort of an empirical observation about the Socratic nature of many of the best people that we've studied. They're great with questions. The funny thing is, when they didn't know the answer, they usually knew the right question to ask. -
Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed and Andrew D. Henderson
- Studying even the right tail of a distribution doesn’t tell you how to break free of the distribution. In short, if you want to use inferential methods to get outside the box, you have to look at someone who is outside the box!
To see the importance of this step in the analysis, ask yourself this question: If two firms in the same industry had differences in shareholder returns (or sales growth or return on assets…it doesn’t really matter) of 0.1 percent over one year, would you think they were behaving in fundamentally different ways? What about 1 percent? 5 percent? 10 percent? Over two years? Or ten? How much of a difference do you need, and for how long, before the performance differences are marked enough that you’re willing to believe that the two firms behaved differently? In every success study we’ve reviewed, what constitutes great performance is simply asserted. Wouldn’t it be useful instead to know – really know – which companies have delivered truly great performances? -
Michael Wolkensperg
- The simplest, and perhaps the best, career advice I have ever given is: worry about what your boss worries about.
In other words, align your priorities with your boss' priorities. If you can apply your energies and creatively contribute to reducing what your boss stresses about, you can't help but be considered as someone with a future in the organization. -
John Wooden
- A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.
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Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.
- A leader needs to know his strengths as a carpenter knows his tools, or as a physician knows the instruments at her disposal. What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths -- and can call on the right strength at the right time. This explains why there is no definitive list of characteristics that describes all leaders.
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John Kotter
- If you've been successful long enough, complacency doesn't disappear easily. And it's fine to celebrate success: You have a sales appreciation meeting and give out a bunch of awards to your employees. They deserve it. They helped you to grow 30 percent this year. But that's history. So you ask them, "What do you have on your calendar for tomorrow that's going to help us grow 30 percent next year?"
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Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall
- Purpose brands create enormous opportunities for differentiation, premium pricing and growth. But reckless management can erode the equity of these brands. There are only two ways to extend brands without destroying them: Marketers can apply the brand to different products that address the same job. Or they can apply the brand to endorse the quality of products that do other jobs and create new purpose brands that benefit from the endorser quality of the original brand.
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Ed Catmull
- We as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks. This instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new... If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails.
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Peter F. Drucker
- What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite--and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to "problems" rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.
What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools--especially our accounting concepts and data--all focus on efficiency. What we need is (1) a way to identify the areas of effectiveness (of possible significant results), and (2) a method for concentrating on them. -
Isaac Newton
- If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Yesbutters and Whynotters
- Yesbutters don�t just kill ideas.
They kill companies, even entire industries.
The yesbutters have all the answers. Yesbut we�re different.
Yesbut we can�t afford it.
Yesbut our business doesn�t need it.
Yesbut we couldn�t sell it to our workforce.
Yesbut we can�t explain it to our shareholders.
Yesbut let�s wait and see.
All the answers. All the wrong answers.
Whynotters move Companies.
The next time you�re in a meeting, look around and identify
the yesbutters, the notnowers and the whynotters.
God bless the whynotters. They dare to dream. And to act.
By acting, they achieve what others see as unachievable.
Why not, indeed? -
Douglas McGregor
- Developing people effectively "...does not include coercing them (no matter how benevolently) into acceptance of the goals of the enterprise, nor does it mean manipulating their behavior to suit organizational needs. Rather, it calls for creating a relationship within which a man can take responsibility for developing his own potentialities, plan for himself, and learn from putting his plan into action."
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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.”
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Watts Wacker
- The information society is completed -- it's actually been around about 90 years. Now we're beginning the post-information society. In Alvin Toffler's terms, any time one of these new 'waves' comes in, like when the agricultural economy started giving way to the industrial economy, you have an 'epoch of uncertainty.' Now we're at a point where the uncertainty may never stabilize -- there is such a cascading of the amount of change with the rate of change. It isn't just about the acceleration of the pace of change. It's also the amount of it. The only certainty we can count on in the future will be a continuing state of uncertainty.
Every epoch has its organizing premise. When we were industrial, it was reason; when we were information, it was complexity, chaos theory, choice modeling...Now we think the new organizing premise is paradox.
So paradox becomes the organizing premise of the post-information society, just as complexity was the organizing premise of the information society. The key to paradox is that you don't do one or the other of those approaches; you do both. -
John McCallum
- What makes economic forecasting so difficult is that, ultimately, it is a call on the behavior of people. It is the willingness or not of consumers to spend, executives to invest and create jobs, savers and money managers to buy stocks and bonds and so on that determines the direction of everything that matters about the economy. Unfortunately for the economic forecaster, behavior is driven by things like feelings, attitudes and fashions, things that can change on a dime. Confidence and fear are the big ones. When people are confident they behave in ways that tend to have good economic outcomes. Fear brings out the worst in us. That people can go from supreme confidence to blind fear and back seemingly instantly will always be the economic forecaster’s curse.
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Gordon Eubanks (original source?)
- Strategy gets you on the playing field, but execution pays the bills.
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Michael Porter
- These two questions are the fundamental questions in strategy. How can you understand your industry and your competitive environment, and how can you understand how to position your company within that environment?
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John Rawls (American philosopher)
- Isn't a fair social system the one that we would pick if we didn't know ahead of time what our role will be?
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