Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we’re right.
The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers.
Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.
Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.
The organization is, above all, social. It is people.
Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present.
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.
To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.
When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.
We can’t make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.
We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad. We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order. We see change as being order itself-indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.
Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.
Effective people are not problem minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.
Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.
If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn’t have stood up.
Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people – and allow people to place themselves – according to their strengths.
Never ask who’s right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.
The computer actually may have aggravated management’s degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.