Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.
What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?
Leadership is an achievement of trust.
Knowledge has become the key resource of the world economy.
In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.
Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.
The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, “If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?”
Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills – accounting and what have you – but you can’t teach them management.
Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions – rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.
No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.
Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.
Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.
In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.
Succession planning often results in the selection of a weaker representation of yourself.
Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one – except warfare – achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.
In today’s economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge.
Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?
Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.
Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.