651 Posts Found

Being able to tell what time it is (that is, knowing the difference between merely difficult times and true times of crisis) is one of the most important analytical skills a leader can have, especially with respect to formulating or reassessing strategy.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Perception

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Personality / Behavior, Wisdom

It can be proved through experiments that people are not conscious of the reasons why they make a decision…People do not know what has influenced their decision and often invent reasons for their choice afterward. Only a small part of decision making reaches the conscious mind, while most decision making, just as most thinking, is below this threshold of consciousness. You know what you are … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read five-year projections.

Content: Quotation | Source: CareerJournal (WSJ) | Subject: Future

There is no efficiency in knowledge work — it’s the wrong target. Discretionary time is required for problem solving, innovative thinking, and fruitful collaborations.

Content: Quotation | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Formal presentations often shut down the very communication they are meant to foster. Without sufficient knowledge of the interests of the audience, a slide show says, “I’ve got the answers and you’re here to listen.” This type of presentation tends to fall short of the impact of simply asking a few well-thought-out questions earlier in the process.

Content: Quotation | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Communication, Persuasion

Prioritization is about doing something. It’s not about an excuse for inaction.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accountability, Action

Networks are based on trust. Because trust is determined through face-to-face interactions, one needs to appreciate the profound and stark truth about networks: ‘You don’t look like me, you don’t dress like me, you don’t think like me, therefore I don’t want to know or understand you.’ This fetish for the familiar is fundamentally tribal and resistant to the heterogeneous qualities of hierarchical organization. So … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

I think that most of our intelligence is based on pattern recognition. Human thinking is actually not very good at logical and analytical thinking. We are very good at recognizing patterns.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Intelligence, Thought

we used to endorse character and integrity, but today the business ethic that reigns is achievement. And whenever you establish the worth of someone based on what they can do and not on who they are, you have created the environment for fraud.

Content: Quotation | Source: CFO Publishing | Subjects: Ethics, Integrity

If all your information is tailored to what you want to know, you may miss that which you don’t know you want to know, and should.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Seattle Times | Subject: Information

Today’s corporation is structured around layers of management. Most of those layers are information relays, and like any relays, they are very poor. Every transfer of information cuts the message in half. There needs to be very few layers of management in the future and those who relay the information must be very smart. But knowledge, as you know, often becomes obsolete incredibly fast.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Economic progress means charging for something that was once free.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Economics, Progress

Confucius was once asked what should be done for the betterment of the people. His answer was to do two things: educate the people and make them wealthy. Education bred an understanding of the uses of wealth; wealth made possible the benefits of education, and both led to personal development.

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subject: Wisdom

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Thought

I don’t think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload. We believe that every person, or organization, can only make so many competent decisions in a given amount of time. Up until the point that we change our biology, there are some fixed limits on the speed by which we individually process information. However, there are enormously powerful tools by which … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subjects: Decision Making, Information

Ambition drastically discounts the value of anything achieved in the present, while overvaluing what may be possible in the future.

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subject: Ambition

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.

Content: Quotation | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Adversity, Personal Development

We have heard it said a thousand times that “practice makes perfect.” As well-meaning as whoever told you this might have been, they were wrong. Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes consistent. Perfect practice makes perfect. Mediocre practice makes mediocrity.

Content: Quotation | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Personal Development, Preparation

In the final analysis, when we fail it is not from lack of knowledge. It is, instead, from lack of wisdom to apply the things we already know. We don’t fail because we don’t know what to do. We fail because we don’t do what we know.

Content: Quotation | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Knowledge, Success / Failure