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.
We always remember best the irrelevant.
The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.
All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations – not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don’t find their jobs interesting.
You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.