We always remember best the irrelevant.
The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.
All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations – not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don’t find their jobs interesting.
You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.
Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.
If “socialism” is defined as “ownership of the means of production” – and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition – then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.
As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.
Knowledge applied is productivity.
Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.
The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.
Making changes to better appeal to customers is innovation.
The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.
No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.
The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.