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.
Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
Management has authority only as long as it performs.
The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.
The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.
No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success.
As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.
If you want to improve how you manage time – stop doing what doesn’t need to be done!
The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.
If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on “human relations” the group is probably too large.
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.
Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.