Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.
Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.
Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.
The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
Information is the manager’s main tool, indeed the manager’s capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.
Teamwork is neither “good” nor “desirable.” It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.
Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
All great change in business has come from outside the firm, not from inside.
Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.
There are no creeds in mathematics.
Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.
To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent.
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.