I was at Ford for 32 years. I went to Chrysler in 1978, four or five months after I got canned by Henry Ford.
If you set a good example you need not worry about setting rules.
Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.
Listening can make the difference between a mediocre organization and a great one.
As you go through life, there are thousands of little forks in the road, and there are a few really big forks-those moments of reckoning, moments of truth.
We load up on oat bran in the morning so we’ll live forever. Then we spend the rest of the day living like there’s no tomorrow.
I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That’s a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.
Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can’t miss.
I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership.
To solve big problems you have to be willing to do unpopular things.
A major reason capable people fail to advance is that they don’t work well with their colleagues.
The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.
The trick is to make sure you don’t die waiting for prosperity to come.
Most people are looking for security, a nice, safe, prosperous future. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s called the American Dream.
There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.
In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
My father used to say, ‘You can spend a lot of time making money. The tough time comes when you have to give it away properly.’ How to give something back, that’s the tough part in life.
When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great marketer.
If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.
The one word that makes a good manager – decisiveness.