The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.
One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.
No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.
The computer is a moron.
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
I’m better about things than about people. I’m more interested in people, but I’m better at ideas.
We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.
Don’t take on things you don’t believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders match the objective needs of their company with the subjective competencies. As a result, they get an enormous amount of things done fast.
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.
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.