Most Recent Quotes
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Paul R. Lawrence
- The classic trading system of exchange is identified with David Ricardo, the early nineteenth-century economist who first analytically clarified it.
As practiced today, Ricardo's classic system results in win-win exchanges when both trading partners are either (1) industrialized nations with modern impulse/check/balance governments, no excessive unemployment, and reasonably effective control of corporate abuses or (2) less-developed nations roughly equal in power and with some control of corporate abuses. Unfortunately, much of today's international trade does not meet these conditions. -
Paul R. Lawrence
- Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives.
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Robert I. Sutton
- To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done.
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Scott Belsky
- [how can one tell if an idea is any good?] Here’s the simple litmus test: Does your community care? Everyone has a “community” of constituents—customers, users, readers, clients, etc. Share your ideas liberally. If your community engages with them (either for or against them), then you know you’re onto something. If they don’t look twice you know that you either need to reconsider the idea or rethink how you communicate it.
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Aristotle
- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
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Jawaharial Nehru
- Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
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Peter Drucker
- Ignorance is the most important component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry. Ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it, and all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently, what you think you know is wrong.
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Karl Weick
- Fight as if you are right, and listen as if you are wrong.
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Mahatma Gandhi
- Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.
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Greek proverb
- A truth spoken before its time is dangerous.
Most Popular Quotes
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Gen. Tony Zinni, Tony Koltz
- We all know good people who are not good leaders. The human being who gets shoved into the leadership machine is not a lump of unformed clay. As humankind has learned over many millennia, ideal people with exceptional character traits are exceedingly rare. Sometimes truly good people fail as leaders, and sometimes deeply flawed people prove to be great ones.
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Edgar H. Schein
- The metaphor of social theater comes into play in that the leader has a choice of what role to play once he or she is thrust into a helping situation. There are three possible roles: 1) The leader can be an “expert” who provides information, actually does the job for the subordinate, or in other ways displays superior knowledge or skill; 2) The leader can be a “doctor” who diagnoses the situation and offers prescriptions (which may include “surgery,” by correcting something that the subordinate is doing wrong); 3) The leader can be what I have called a “process consultant,” by first inquiring about the nature of the help needed, why it might be needed, and how it might be gotten best.
A central principle of helping is that it should begin in the process consultant role in order to elicit appropriate information on what is actually needed and in order to equilibrate the relationship by showing respect for the client’s own understanding of his or her own situation. Once the leader understands what the subordinate actually needs, he or she can offer the appropriate help by shifting into an expert’s or doctor’s mode (or stay in the process consulting mode and adopt a coaching approach). There are two dangers in adopting the expert or doctor roles prematurely: The wrong problem will be worked on, because the subordinate was not encouraged to be clear about what he or she really needs, and secondly, the subordinate will become more dependent. -
Peter Drucker
- Ignorance is the most important component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry. Ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it, and all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently, what you think you know is wrong.
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Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
- You can advertise. You can hire sales people. You can sponsor events. But your competitors are doing the same things. How does that help you stand out?
Instead of trying to out-spend, out-sell, or out-sponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them. -
Howard Mann
- Obsessing about your competitors, trying to match or best their offerings, spending time each day wanting to know what they are doing, and/or measuring your company against them—these activities have no great or winning outcome. Instead you are simply prohibiting your company from finding its own way to be truly meaningful to its Clients, staff and prospects. You block your company from finding its own identity and engaging with the people who pay the bills... Your competitors have never paid your bills and they never will.
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Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
- When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention—they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos, whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience. Then, when you need to get the word out, the right people will already be listening.
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Jeffrey Hollender and Bill Breen
- Here’s a question that every business leader should ask, but too few do: “What does the world need most that our business is uniquely able to provide?”
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Ben Horowitz
- Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions. Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite combination of intelligence, logic, and courage.
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Todd Sattersten
- One of the best ways to improve retention of the material you are about to read is to imagine yourself having to tell someone else about it. That act of imagining yourself as teacher completely changes the way you read. As you turn the pages, you start to anticipate what would be most interesting and applicable to your “class.” You begin to organize the structure by which you are going to share this new information. The logical result of this strategy is to record memorable and valuable highlights.
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Henry Mintzberg
- You [create a community-oriented style of management] through an engaged management that cares, not a heroic leadership that cures. This means giving up the false dichotomy between leaders and managers. Would you like to work for a manager who doesn’t lead? That can be terribly discouraging. What about a leader who doesn’t manage? That can be awfully disengaging: How is he or she to know what is going on? We have had more than enough of detached, heroic leadership. It is time for more engaged management, embedded in “communityship.
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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. -
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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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? -
Isaac Newton
- If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Henry W. Chesbrough
- In essence, a business model performs two important functions: It creates value and it captures a portion of that value. The first function requires defining a series of activities (from raw materials through to the final customer) that will yield a new product or service, with value being added throughout the various activities. The second function requires the establishing of a unique resource, asset or position within that series of activities in which the firm enjoys a competitive advantage.
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