Roy Williams
- The value of an item – in the mind of a consumer – is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag. When the anticipated price is higher than the price tag, it’s a good value.
Bernice McCarthy
- All real change involves major uncertainty, and we cannot deny the questioning time to others simply because we have already answered the questions for ourselves.
John Kenneth Galbraith
- Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
Arthur Friedman
- People of genius are admired. People of wealth are envied. People of power are feared. But only people of character are trusted.
Edith Wharton
- There are only two ways of spreading light—to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Robert Rosen
- I’ve observed that the best leaders are those who have mastered three key paradoxes: realistic optimism, constructive impatience and confident humility.
Vince Lombardi
- The new leadership is in sacrifice, it is in self-denial, it is in love and loyalty, it is in fearlessness, it is in humility, and it is in the perfectly disciplined will. This...is the distinction between great and little men.
George C. Marshall
- Morale is the state of mind. It is steadfastness and courage and hope. It is confidence and zeal and loyalty...It is staying power, the spirit which endures to the end - the will to win. With it all things are possible, without it everything else...is for naught.
Peter Drucker
- Communication...always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.
Milton Friedman
- A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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Joseph Schumpeter
- Innovation is ultimately not an act of intellect but of will.
Charles Handy
- The letters MBA should, if the schools were honest, stand for Master of Business Analysis, because the tools and disciplines of analysis are what the students learn, not management, or administration as it used to be called. Analysis is a necessary part of good management and leadership but it is not the whole of it. Who to trust, how to inspire, how brave to be, how forgiving or not—these relationship and judgment skills may be discussed in a classroom but they can only be learned by practicing them.
You can bring the world into the classroom but you cannot replicate it there. The new MBA graduate should carry a white flag as she or he goes to work for the first time—"I know how to count," it would say. "Now teach me how to do."
Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis
- Most of a leader's important calls reside in one of three domains: people, strategy, or crisis. People judgments—getting the right people on your team and developing up-and-comers who themselves demonstrate good judgment—are foundational. The people around you help you make good strategy judgment calls and the best decisions during the occasional but inevitable crisis. It's sometimes possible to repair the damage—to a company or a career—that results from misjudgments about strategy or crises, but it is almost impossible to recover from poor people judgment.
Vikram Mahidhar and Christine Cutten
- Marketing creates strategic value in two ways: connecting customers and markets to the organization by influencing awareness and behavior, and connecting the organization to customers and markets by creating customer knowledge within the organization.
Robert Kugel
- Most organizations are good at collecting internally focused data, but few systematically provide insight about a company's external environment. For example, only 21 percent regularly track how their competitors are performing. Business is not an us-vs.-us exercise, yet management reports rarely touch on the world outside.
Edgar H Schein
- Change must be distinguished from “new learning” in that it implies some unlearning that is intrinsically difficult and often painful. Motivation to change does not arise until the change target feels secure enough to accept the disconfirming data. The change target feels “psychologically safe” if he or she can accept a new attitude or value without complete loss of self.
Once the individual feels safe, he or she can accept new information either through identification with others or by scanning the environment for new solutions. The more ambiguous the situation, the more the individual will rely on the judgments of others. New concepts and standards will not survive unless they are socially and personally reinforced.
David Snowden
- Humans do not make rational, logical decisions based on information input, instead they pattern match with either their own experience, or collective experience expressed as stories. It isn’t even a best fit pattern match, but a first fit pattern match … The human brain is also subject to habituation, things that we do frequently create habitual patterns which both enable rapid decision making, but also entrain behavior in such a manner that we literally do not see things that fail to match the patterns of our expectations.
Keith McFarland
- One of the executives I interviewed said, “There’s no such thing as corporate culture.” His point was that the minute you start talking about corporate culture, it be comes somebody else’s problem—the leader’s problem. He said, “We don’t focus on corporate culture. We focus on character.” When you use the word character, that’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s about how we treat each other.
Edgar H Schein
- The degree to which individuals are subject to outside influences is a function of their freedom to move, which in the case of career influences, depends very much on the labor market. In the study of coercive persuasion I learned how powerful the group can be. But in an open society I learned that individuals are equally powerful, if they can choose their own settings.
Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy
- To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.
All Time
Isaac Newton
- If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
David Pottruck
- Dismal failure is if you had an idea, you didn't plan it very well, you executed it really poorly, and after you failed, you felt sorry for yourself. Noble failure is if you had an idea, you planned it well, you executed it well, it failed. And then you said, 'What can we learn from this?'...
Peter Drucker
- Although I invented the term "profit center" 40 years ago - one of my lesser contributions - a subsidiary of a division is not a profit center, but a cost center. The only profit center is the customer. Until the customer has paid his bill, there are only costs, and until the customer has come back with a repeat order there is no customer.
Sam Walton
- There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
- The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
Peter Drucker
- Very few of us, myself included, know the customer. One reason is that all of us believe, and must believe, that the product and the service we produce is important. But 99.9% of your customers couldn't care less about your product or service. You are not that important in their universe. And that's almost impossible to accept.
The second reason is that you amass an enormous amount of information about the people who buy from you. Yet, for almost all companies, at least 70% of the people or organizations that should be your customers are not. So, if you want to understand the customer, those people who aren't your customers are the key.
Robert Louis Stevenson
- To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
William Wrigley Jr.
- When two people in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
V. Kasturi "Kash" Rangan
- Most channels are constructed from the supplier out, rather than from the customer in. In other words, the product or service is designed first and it is only then that the supplier thinks about ways to get the product/service out to the customer. If the company achieves its sales goals, it lulls the company into the assumption that the channels must be right. For all you know an alternate channel might have achieved even better results.
The more common pitfall is that the chosen channel is an expedient short-term solution, often not well suited to sustain sales and profitability in the long run. But once a channel is up and running it is very hard to shut it down and construct a new one. So the channel is temporarily repaired, a "band-aid" is applied, and the selling process moves on.
Several years and band-aids later, managers may realize that their channels serve neither their customers nor their channel partners well, but it is too late.
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