Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.
Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.
What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.
The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.
Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century-Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.
An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
Ideas are like frog eggs: you’ve got to lay a thousand to hatch one.
The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.
The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
The corporation is the “master”, the employee is the “servant”. Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.
The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.
The moment people talk of “implementing” instead of “doing,” and of “finalizing” instead of “finishing,” the organization is already running a fever.
Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.
What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.
Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.
One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people.
Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.
The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.
A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.