651 Posts Found

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

Knowledge management resources go unused for one simple reason: They’re not useful. Either the work isn’t connected to the knowledge or the knowledge isn’t connected to the work.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subject: Knowledge

Governments should be concerned with creating the type of investment climate (rule of law, healthy and well-educated people, good physical infrastructure, favorable tax structure, respect for private property, and so on), that leads to private investment. Organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations should limit their activities to assisting governments in this area, rather than attempt to become economic players themselves. When … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Government, International

Awareness is not a giver of solace–it is just the opposite. It is a disturber and an awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. They are not seekers after solace. They have their own inner serenity.

Content: Quotation | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Attention, Leadership

When our mind gets too much information, we either ignore most of it or group it into chunks. This is how we make decisions about information really quickly, and our brains are hardwired this way. When we were troglodytes, we had to make a rapid decision when something jumped in front of us to either run away or club it on the head. We are … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Red Herring | Subjects: Information, Personality / Behavior

Once formed, symbols persist until they are replaced by other, more powerful symbols.

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Perception

In order to work, knowledge-management systems have to be kept live, and there have to be incentives to keep them live. In some sense, the most important source of knowledge is inside people’s heads. You don’t want an organization that’s leakier than necessary. You don’t want too many people cycling out. You need to set up team structures, so that the more experienced people teach … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Milton Friedman used to remind us that a long-term tax cut isn’t a long-term tax cut at all unless it’s accompanied by a long-term spending cut. It’s essentially a deferred tax, a tax increase on the future.

Content: Quotation | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Economics, Government

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Thought

The availability of information is perhaps the single most significant contributor to corporate change. As Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase concluded almost 70 years ago, the boundaries of the firm are defined by its transaction costs. “A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Information

In the old days, things didn’t change quite so fast, and media or more accurately genres with a given medium had a chance to stabilize. Then we would subconsciously appropriate a genre and know how to read the content through the lenses of that genre. But today things are changing so rapidly that you don’t have that much stability in many of the genres which … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Emerald Now | Subject: Knowledge

In the information technology world we tend to make everything explicit. We don’t understand how to design for the sub-conscious mind – we design for the conscious mind and we only pay attention to content. But humans pay attention to context as well as content, that’s how we make sense out of the world. Indeed…content without context is often meaningless or dangerously mis-interpretable. When you … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Emerald Now | Subjects: Information, IT / Technology / E-Business

People have been saying for a long time that the widespread availability of information would democratize organizations, and that the upward and downward movements of information would be replaced by horizontal ones. I just don’t see it happening.

In fact, the widespread availability of information is making it easier for senior executives to check on and control every movement of people at lower levels. So, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Information, Organizational Behavior

The [work-life balance] problem…is that while success at work is largely rooted in achievement, success outside of work mostly isn’t. The things most of us say we value in our nonwork lives — simply caring and being there for others — aren’t a function of accomplishing anything per se. Contentedness in that realm is less a matter of doing more than of cutting back.

Obvious … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Career, Life

Finding, winnowing, sorting, and organizing information takes priority over creating it. After all, the Library of Congress wouldn’t be of much value if all the books were piled randomly on the floor. The way information is presented and organized becomes as important as the content.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subject: Information

People still have anxiety about how to assimilate a body of knowledge that is expanding by the nanosecond. Misinformation and mayhem are rampant. Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge. It happens when information doesn’t tell us what we want to know. Our relationship … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subjects: Information, Knowledge

Where we once went to great lengths in this country to find information-like walking from one town to the next-and we were concerned with not having enough information, now we’re more concerned with winnowing down the amount, even avoiding the constant barrage. A reduced amount of useful information seems preferable to skimming everything possible.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subject: Information

Self-confidence is not the real secret of leadership. The more essential ingredient is confidence in other people. Leadership involves motivating others to their finest efforts and channeling those efforts in a coherent direction. Leaders must believe that they can count on other people to come through.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Confidence, Leadership

A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.

Content: Quotation | Source: Zaadz | Subject: Ambition

Information is not intelligence, and gathering information is not carrying out competitive intelligence. Many companies have mechanisms to accumulate large amounts of information; significantly fewer companies have mechanisms for conducting competitive intelligence.

Intelligence uses information as raw material, screening, sifting, sorting, verifying, analyzing, interpreting, and compiling it to create a useful output. And just as information is raw material for intelligence, intelligence is raw material for … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Intelligence