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Most Recent Quotes

J. Ruth Gendler - Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn't like to wear it much but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or else I would accidentally leave it in the ... dressing room. But it has my name on the label now and it doesn't really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you have to find the courage to approach him and ask him to make your coat. Then, you must find the patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.
Unknown - Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
Muhammad Yunus - A social business is a profit-making company driven by a larger mission. It carries the energy and entrepreneurship of the private sector, raises capital through the market economy, and deals with products, services, customers, markets, expenses, and revenues - but with the profit-maximization principle replaced by the social-benefit principle.
Marjorie Kelly - It has been clear since the days of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means - who published their breakthrough book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, in 1932 - that business ownership is often separated from its most vital element, control. These [for-benefit business] designs go further by concentrating control in a deliberately chosen group, selected as stewards of the firm's living mission. Ownership shares can be bought and sold like property, but controlling shares represent a living essence that is not for sale - or for sale only under restricted conditions.
Erika Andersen - And the antidote to fear? Pull people out of their panic and self-protective impulses by first acknowledging the difficulties, then raising their eyes and hearts to a possibility of success.

At that point you can take advantage of their newly available and hopeful energy to make that possibility a reality.
Charles Jacobs - Because a story is not an argument, it doesn’t summon up reason in defense. Stories ask only that we entertain them, and when we do, we rehearse the view of the world they embody. If we fnd it more attractive or a better ft with our experience, we adopt it. Because stories are experiences, they address both the intellect and emotions that drive our decision-making.

Sociologists have found that the stories in our culture most effective at mobilizing people in support of a mission are about changing to overcome an obstacle and realizing a better future as a result. When it comes to business, the story we tell should be about people coming together to change their behavior to create the greatest company ever.

While people will quickly pick up on our story and take it as their own, they’ll also pick up on any duplicity or distrust. We are bad liars, but good detectors of lying. We really need to believe the story we tell, so that all of our decisions and actions will be aligned. That’s the only way it will be convincing and drive the behavior we need.
Charles Jacobs - Rather than attempt to manage behavior with reasons or rewards, we’ll be more effective if we manage the ideas that drive behavior. As one experiment has shown, an idea can change not just how we think, but how we feel. Subjects were shown a picture of a woman crying and brain scans showed enhanced activity in the emotion-generating amygdala. But when the researchers changed the subjects’ view by telling them she was crying tears of joy because it was her wedding day, the activity decreased.
Mark Penn - The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, bloggers are becoming the Fifth Estate.

All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story.
Atanu Chaudhuri, Craig Giffi, Kumar Kandaswami, Shalabh Kumar Singh - While companies assume there is necessarily a trade-off between efficiency and responsiveness in a constrained environment, research shows that only those organizations operating near the performance frontier (the optimal performance a company can achieve) should expect trade-offs. The companies that operate away from the frontier have the potential to improve both efficiency and responsiveness; the companies that operate at or close to optimal performance levels can strive to shift their frontier through innovation and gain sustainable competitive advantage.
Enduring ideas: The 7-S Framework - In the first in a series of interactive presentations, McKinsey examines 7-S, a framework introduced to address the critical role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness.

Most Popular Quotes

Recent

David Ogilvy - If you hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If you hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.
K. Scott Derrick - Management is a position that is granted; leadership is a status that is earned.
Alfred Armand Montapert - We see problems, not as they are, but as we are. That's why attitude plays such a crucial role in separating those who lead from those who follow. Alfred Armand Montapert said, "The majority see the obstacles; the few see the objectives; history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former."
Frederick W. Gluck, Stephen P. Kaufman, and A. Steven Walleck - A minor but pervasive frustration that seems to be unique to management as a profession is the rapid obsolescence of its jargon. As soon as a new management concept emerges, it becomes popularized as a buzzword, generalized, overused, and misused until its underlying substance has been blunted past recognition.
Ronald Reagan - You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
Calvin Coolidge - Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. TALENT will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. GENIUS will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. EDUCATION will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On,” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Mahatma Gandhi (???) - A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
E. L. Kersten - Gratitude has received little serious attention in the literature on job attitudes. This may be because most people see it as a spontaneous emotional response to an external event. But University of California psychologist Robert Emmons makes a compelling argument that gratitude is better thought of as a discipline or a skill, more akin to goal-setting or time management, rather than simply another dimension of job satisfaction. It’s something that you choose to do, and,for most people, it requires practice—that is, consciously making an effort to be more grateful. It involves a reexamination of the benefits that you have experienced and simply learned to take for granted.

It’s important to note that practicing gratitude doesn’t mean pretending that everything in life is going well when it isn’t. It doesn’t eliminate negative emotional responses to negative events. If you are passed up for a promotion, you’re still right to feel disappointed. The difference is that being grateful for the things that are going well provide context that helps stabilize negative emotions.
Steve Miller - There are two kinds of people in the world—either process-oriented or project-oriented.
Woodruff “Woody” Driggs and Naomi Kasolowsky - Loyalty is not necessarily an emotional connection to the brand. True brand evangelists—or even potential evangelists—are at best rare and possibly non-existent. Companies need to recognize, develop and manage more than one kind of customer loyalty: conditional, emotional and passive—using more than one kind of strategy.

All Time

Isaac Newton - If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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."
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?'...
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?
Alfie Kohn - In short, "Do this and you'll get that" makes people focus on the "that" not the "this." Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad - Any company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it.
Gordon Eubanks (original source?) - Strategy gets you on the playing field, but execution pays the bills.
Yesbutters and Whynotters - Yesbutters donï¿½t just kill ideas.
They kill companies, even entire industries.
The yesbutters have all the answers. Yesbut weï¿½re different.
Yesbut we canï¿½t afford it.
Yesbut our business doesnï¿½t need it.
Yesbut we couldnï¿½t sell it to our workforce.
Yesbut we canï¿½t explain it to our shareholders.
Yesbut letï¿½s wait and see.
All the answers. All the wrong answers.

Whynotters move Companies.

The next time youï¿½re 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?
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?
Aaron De Smet, Mark Loch, Bill Schaninger - Companies can keep an eye on their health by regularly assessing all their business ideas and new initiatives-projects or programs to change or improve something in the business. They should evaluate these projects both by mapping the point when each would be likely to create the greatest value and by looking at whether a project involves familiar, routine work that plays to their strengths and experiences or is a novel departure, which could be riskier and consume additional resources. Healthy companies seek to keep a balance between the two and know that it is not a trade-off between the short and long terms: investing for the long term means action today.

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