By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.
The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.
The race for Quality has no finish line – so technically, it’s more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
There’s nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.
When Henry Ford said, “The customer can have a car in any color as long as it’s black,” he was not joking.
Business is society’s change agent.
Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world – or in the communist countries – has been successful.
What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can’t be very good.
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.
Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.
The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.
Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.
All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.
The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.
Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.
Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.
Quality of character doesn’t make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.
The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as “unearned income” and “capitalist,” if not as sinful and wicked.
The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become “everybody’s entitlement” and an increasing burden on those who produce.
Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.