We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.
As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.
Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.
A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
The real achiever does one thing at a time.
Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.
Morale in an organization does not mean that “people get along together”; the test is performance not conformance.
If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.
The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn’t preparation for work and never was.
I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.
There’s an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
What’s measured improves.
Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say “health care”; that’s an intention, not an objective.
Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.
Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.
In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.