651 Posts Found

I often think of reading not as the acquisition of static knowledge but as the active springboard for thinking and dynamic contemplation — hence the combinatorial, LEGO-like nature of creativity, wherein we assemble building blocks of existing knowledge into new formations of understanding that we consider our original ideas.

Content: Quotation | Author: Maria Popova | Source: Brain Pickings | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Knowledge

For any knowledge worker, even for the file clerk, there are two laws. The first one is that knowledge evaporates unless it’s used and augmented. Skill goes to sleep, it becomes rusty, but it can be restored and refurbished very quickly. That’s not true of knowledge. If knowledge isn’t challenged to grow, it disappears fast. It’s infinitely more perishable than any other resource we have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

Information, like electricity, is energy. Just as electrical energy is energy for mechanical tasks, information is energy for mental tasks.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Information, Knowledge

Psychology tells us that the one sure way to shut off all perception is to flood the senses with stimuli. That’s why the manager with reams of computer output on his desk is hopelessly uninformed. That’s why it’s so important to exploit the computer’s ability to give us only the information we want—nothing else. The question we must ask is not, “How many figures can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

We cannot put on the computer what we cannot quantify. And we cannot quantify what we cannot define. Many of the important things, the subjective things, are in this category. To know something, to really understand something important, one must look at it from 16 different angles. People are perceptually slow, and there is no shortcut to understanding; it takes a great deal of time. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman … writes of two fictitious mental processes that he calls System 1 (“thinking fast”) and System 2 (“thinking slow”). System 1 mental operations are rapid and automatic; they are biased toward belief and confirmation rather than analysis and skepticism; they tend to jump to conclusions and infer causal relations based on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Thought, Trends / Analysis

Most businesses accept design as inherited. The business model, pricing, functions, sales pitch, deal structure—nearly everything—is treated as predefined by the existing models, costs, and pricing that already exist in the company and/or the industry. Idea generation is viewed as the creative part, and execution as standard. If a company has a design sensibility at all, it applies almost exclusively to the sensory elements we … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Design, Execution, Management

Peter Drucker said that “to defend yesterday is a larger risk than to create tomorrow.” Concentrating for too long on what was at the expense of what will be has been the formula for failure for many CEOs.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert M. Donnelly | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Future, Leadership, Management, Planning, Strategy

Because we self-select sites we visit, the Internet pushes people to reinforce their own preconceived ideas and opinions, such that groups solidify more internally due to the attractive forces of common belief but fragment more externally due to the repulsive forces of opposing belief. This mental malignancy metastasizes in two ways: less diversity within groups and more alienation between groups.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Lawrence Kuhn | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork, Thought

The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Smith | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Government

We live in uncertain environments. Uncertainty derives in good measure from the limited cognition (dispersed and specific capabilities) of different economic actors. Consequently, knowledge differences lead to division of labor and to specialization throughout the economy. A firm is that entrepreneurial organ that utilizes such division of labor and specialization to achieve some more or less well-defined ends. As such, it is akin to a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Giampaolo Garzarelli | Subjects: Economics, Knowledge, Miscellaneous

The effectiveness of a company’s problem solving, as measured along the dimensions of cost, speed, and accuracy, is influenced by five elements: strategy (that is, the core of the company’s problem-solving approach, which drives decisions about the other elements), framing, data selection, choice and implementation of a solution method, and selection of problem solvers. Classical enterprises typically lack a strategy for problem solving. They try … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jussi Lehtinen, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions

It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because […] all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Achievement, Luck, Success / Failure

An organization’s strategy represents the desired pattern of organizational attention, on which everyone should share a degree of focus, each in their particular way. A given strategy makes choices about what to ignore and what matters: Market share or profit? Current competitors or potential ones? Which new technologies? When leaders choose strategy, they are guiding attention.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Goleman | Source: European Business Review | Subjects: Attention, Strategy

Analytics is to management as a light bulb is to darkness: it is illuminating and helpful in revealing both future opportunities and pitfalls. Descriptive analytics seeks to understand past data and is widely used. Predictive analytics seeks to understand the future. This is a challenge for many firms, since it brings in risk (the future is uncertain) and the need to manage risk. Prescriptive … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Bell | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Information, IT / Technology / E-Business, Trends / Analysis

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake—you can’t learn anything from being perfect.

Content: Quotation | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Experience, Learning, Mistakes, Success / Failure

When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And management techniques, practices, and strategies are no different. When you read a business book or attend a presentation on a particular management practice, it is a good habit to explicitly ask, “What might it not be good for?” When might it not work; what could be its drawbacks?

[…] There is a second … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Freek Vermeulen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Thought, Trends / Analysis

The next time someone offers you advice, ask yourself these two questions: Can I imagine the opposite ever making sense, and will I know if I’ve acted on it? If the answer to either one is “no,” you’re at grave risk of being led astray.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Personal Development, Thought

Learning something that is both new and true seems to be extraordinarily difficult only when it is extraordinarily important.
[…]
In the words of one commentator, our rational mind is a mouse riding, and attempting to steer, the elephant that is our emotions. Since that elephant, even when entirely even-tempered, can wreak havoc with our rational intent, we must—at the risk of getting all new … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Thought

If deductive reasoning were all it ever took to reach a correct conclusion, there would be far fewer bad decisions. The problem is, far too often the facts are either ambiguous or incomplete in ways we cannot see until it is too late. When we apply reason to unwittingly incorrect or unknowingly under-specified premises, we end up with precise, convincing, and completely wrong conclusions. It’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought