Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.
Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.
Win small, win early, win often.
There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.
Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs.
Never before has the gap between what we can imagine and what we can accomplish been smaller.
Our biggest challenge is how to create a self-renewing company.
Organizational structures of today demand too much from a few, and not much at all from everyone else.
Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.
This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.
The problem with the future is that it is different, if you are unable to think differently, the future will always arrive as a surprise.
A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.
In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record – it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart.
To be embraced, a change effort must be socially constructed in a process that gives everyone the right to set priorities, diagnose barriers, and generate options.
I’m not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.
It doesn’t matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is – what matters is its relative ‘share of customer value’ in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.
At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.
What’s true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That’s why the most resilient things in our world – biological life, stock markets, the Internet – are loosely organized.