We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game.
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple.
If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.
For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter.
Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.
If you managed a baseball team, would you listen more closely to the team accountant or the director of player personnel?
The hero is the one with ideas.
The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.
Not surprisingly, work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.
People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t rocket science. We’ve chosen one of the world’s simplest professions.
A good leader remains focused. Controlling your destination is better than being controlled by it.
Creative artists have great passion.
Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.
When it’s time to let someone go, do it right. No surprises. No humiliation.
If we get the right people in the right job we’ve won the game.
It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. Ten years. Fifteen years. You’ve got to get up everyday, with a new idea, a new spin, and you’ve got to bring it to work, every day.
Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.
Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can’t – you can’t put a wall up around here. We tried that in the ’30s. It didn’t work.
The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.