Most Recent Quotes

Warren Buffet - “I will tell you how to become rich. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
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.
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.
Michael Wagner - Don't wait for perfection, praise progress.
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.
Doug Ulman - If someone comes up with a great idea—or even an idea—we should start at yes, and work through every reason why we can't do it. We never start at no.
Michael Schrage - Instead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity. ...the new economics of personal productivity mean that the better organized we try to become, the more wasteful and inefficient we become. We'll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn't to organize ourselves better; it's to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It's not that we're becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it's that we haven't become dependent enough.
Marcia Xenitelis - Unless employees truly understand the issues [that affect the business] and make a meaningful connection between their jobs and those issues, their attitudes and behaviors will not change. To achieve engagement, three things have to happen: The business issue has to mean something to the employee personally, the employee has to understand the issue (and I mean truly understand it, not just read about why it is an issue), and most important, each employee must be made to feel a part of the change process.
Zbigniew Krysiak - The concept of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) sprung from the shortcomings of Value Based Management (VBM). This approach does not take into consideration the relative change between risk dynamic and the dynamic of value. Forgetting this type of analysis led in the past to instances of a very satisfactory and high increase in value, even though the company went bankrupt. Therefore, in the business environment, we have to estimate the value-to-risk ratio to determine if the company condition is improving or deteriorating. To make it real and decline the default risk, a new approach to company risk management has to be assumed, which can be summarized as Enterprise Risk Management (ERM).

There are several specific approaches to ERM because it is very much related to the individual business context of any enterprise, therefore each business has to find an individual “suit.” Enterprise Risk Management can be defined as an integrated and holistic approach to credit risk, market risk, operational risk, business risk, and economic capital management. This includes risk control, mitigation, and risk transfer to maximize value of the company. Successful ERM implementation takes a long time and requires engagement of all the managers within the company. ERM requires advanced tools and analytical methods as well as some different approaches to managerial accounting when reflecting financial results on the balance sheet
Frank Plaschke, Fabrice Roghé, Fabian Günther - Given today’s volatile environment, the overall focus for planning must move away from precise forecasting and toward more strategic, top-down ambition-setting that is validated with bottom-up business insight. This approach should be tied to contingency plans in case the targets cannot be met—and complemented by more frequent short-term forecasts of key metrics. However, embracing unpredictability and encouraging entrepreneurship within reasonable limits entails a significant shift in the management culture of many large corporations.

Most Popular Quotes

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Alison Maitland - A good way to start a conversation about whether a corporate culture is inclusive is to ask, “What would your daughter think about working here?” or, “Do you think your daughter—or niece or granddaughter—would find it easy to make as successful a career here as you have?”
Michael E. Raynor - We shouldn’t take the view that we need a single narrative that unifies our experiences. Rather, we should carry multiple narratives simultaneously, continuously updating our estimates of the contours of each and our assessments of which is most likely to be right as new data points become available. Need to understand why your company is successful? Entertain the possibility that you’ve just been lucky, as well as that it is the fruit of your carefully constructed and diligently executed strategy. Think about what sorts of future events would lend more credence to one explanation over the other, and interpret what happens through both lenses. Never fully abandon either narrative, and be willing to entertain new ones.

In short, data never speaks for itself, and our intuitions will always unwittingly deceive us. The best hope I can offer for a path to purposeful action based on a meaningful approximation of the truth is to abandon the pointless quest for a single version of it.
Michael E. Raynor - The gulf between the question you want to ask and the question you can answer is often unbridgeable.
Jim Collins - Creativity is natural and abundant, the natural human state. We are creative beings. Being creative is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to marry creativity to discipline so that the discipline amplifies the creativity, rather than squelching it. Truly great entrepreneurs do not just have a great idea (and often, they copy their ideas from others). The entrepreneurial path to greatness is to go from idea to business, then business to company, then company to great company, then great company into enduring great company. To accomplish this entire journey requires much more than just a creative idea.
Michael Beer - Business schools are teaching ethics and corporate social responsibility, but they do not teach these subjects in the context of building a higher-ambition or a high commitment, high performance firm. Students learn about finance and organizational behavior, for example, without ever learning how to integrate these and many other disciplines (marketing, operations, etc.) into a coherent, internally consistent set of practices that collectively reinforce a higher- ambition mission. If financial considerations require cost cutting, what should be the stance of the company toward layoffs if management also aspires to develop commitment from employees? If the company strategy calls for rapid growth, can this be done without diluting the higher-ambition culture? If you are trying to develop such a culture, rapid growth makes it harder to find people who fit the culture and possess the capabilities needed. And business schools... do not ask students to reflect on their values and define who they are and then help them see how these values relate to decisions they make about strategy, performance measurement, growth, and so on.

In short, business schools... do not teach integrity. By integrity we mean learning about (1) how different disciplines must be integrated with each other and higher-ambition purpose and values, and (2) how students' espoused higher-ambition values are reflected in decisions and actions they recommend should be taken in marketing, strategy, and finance. What business schools need is a course that teaches students how to think and act to build a higher-ambition firm.
James Krohe Jr. - At the heart of KM has always lurked a subversive notion: If knowledge is a company’s most important asset, and if the people who work for it collectively possess a deeper knowledge of how the company works, then the people employed by it should be better placed to run it than the executives. Harnessing collective wisdom only needs some means to manage collectively.
Jeff Bezos - Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?
Joel Kurtzman - War is war—and very different from business. In war, your enemy is hidden on the other side of the hill and is waiting there to surprise and destroy you. Your enemy is an army or air force or navy, like you, and the match is like chess.

But in business, the enemy is more like the old comic-strip character Pogo once said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Toyota is not coming over the hill to destroy Volkswagen or Ford or Fiat; Toyota is coming over the hill to satisfy the needs of motorists around the world. Smashing Toyota with a head-on assault is impossible, because war takes place head-on while business takes place at a ninety-degree angle—one company or firm succeeds against another not by attacking that company but by satisfying its own clients’ needs.
James Heskett - A CEO... should be tracking and managing by the numbers—the nonfinancial numbers. By the time financial results turn downward, it is far too late to act. Financial numbers measure the past and lead to "rearview mirror management."

The numbers that predict the future are the Four Rs-employee retention and referrals, returns to labor (productivity), and relationships with customers (exhibited by loyalty and ownership behaviors such as referrals)—as well as measures that track innovation. Once these numbers start to turn downward, it's time to reexamine organization values and behaviors, hiring practices, and other elements of the culture cycle.
Adrian Slywotzky, Karl Weber - It’s a funny thing about demand: There’s often a huge gap between what people buy and what they truly want and need. That gap is revealed by the Hassle Map—and that gap is where the opportunity to create huge new demand is hiding. There are various kinds of Hassle Maps. Some Hassle Maps are lists of the steps involved in a process, often including too many activities that are needlessly complicated or whose value and purpose are unclear. Filling out your income tax return might be an example.

Other Hassle Maps chart the people, organizations, suppliers, and sources a customer must engage to complete a given task, often leading to confusion, waste, excess choice, and information overload—renovating a kitchen, for instance.

And still others graph the trade-offs between consumer needs that are equally desirable yet apparently mutually exclusive: In one arena after another, customers are told they can have low cost or quality, convenience or variety, personal service or speed—but never both.

All Time

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.”
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.
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.
Peter Drucker - In the last 40 or 50 years, economics was dominant. In the next 20 or 30 years, social issues will be dominant.
Gordon Eubanks (original source?) - Strategy gets you on the playing field, but execution pays the bills.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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