Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement. Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
If you want it, measure it. If you can’t measure it, forget it.
If you want to predict the future, create it.
The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.
The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.
A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organization.
Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.
All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides – he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.
The one man to distrust, however, is the man who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. He is either a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.
It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships.
The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.