Miracles are great, but they’re so damn unpredictable.
People learn the most when teaching others.
Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.
One does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.
Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.
The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.
The days of the ‘intuitive’ manager are numbered.
The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.
The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.
Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.
And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today’s big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.
Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.
The subordinate’s job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.
There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions .
Organizationally what is required – and evolving – is systems management.
The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.
The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model .
Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.
A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.