The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right – but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.
Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.
If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the “bourgeois” under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.
For the social ecologist language is not “communication.” It is not just “message.” It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. Social ecologists need not be “great” writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.
If general perception changes from seeing the glass as ‘half-full’ to seeing it as ‘half empty’ there are major innovative opportunities.
No one has ever failed to find the facts they are looking for.
We’ve spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we’ll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.
The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.
It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.
An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.
Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.
The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.
Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
One either meets or one works.
Successful leaders don’t start out asking, ‘What do I want to do?’ They ask, ‘What needs to be done?’ Then they ask, ‘Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?’
Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.
Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.
Management has authority only as long as it performs.