A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.
It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.
The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.
Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.
There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.
The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.
Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.
Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.
Follow effective action with quiet reflection.
In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.
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.