Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.
There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment – and you start to decline.
Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.
It’s not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can’t run your family like a company. It doesn’t work.
I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.
If the brutal facts are not faced by leaders, the brutal reality sets in.
Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.
You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.
How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.
Investment decisions and personal decisions don’t wait for the picture to be clarified.
The worse the news, the more effort should go into communicating it.
Most companies don’t die because they are wrong; they die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.
The Internet doesn’t change everything. It doesn’t change supply and demand.
Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.
The most important role of managers is to create environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in marketplace.
I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.
A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.