It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.
The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education – or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments – is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...
Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong – these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.
History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.
Leaders grow; they are not made.
The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, “We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again.”
Our society has become an employee society.
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, The enterprise must demand it of him.
Shoes are real. Money is an end result.
The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.
In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.
I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.
One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.
Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.
Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.
The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.
I would hope that American managers-indeed, managers worldwide-continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than “making deals.” Management affects people and their lives.
A manager’s task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant – and that applies fully as much to the manager’s boss as it applies to the manager’s subordinates.