Vision is dandy, but sustainable company excellence comes from a huge stable of able managers.
An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader’s premier trait.
I am my clients. I am defined by who I do business with.
The hyperfast-moving, wired-up, reengineered, quality-obsessed organization will succeed or fail on the strength of the trust that its managers place in the folks working on the front line.
Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets.
The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers.
The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.
Send 10-TEN!!-people flowers. Today. As “Thank yous” for good things “small”-or even large-done in the last two weeks.
Integrity may be about little things as much or more than big ones.
One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period.
The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. If you wait until you believe you are safe, sure to be without occasional foolish feelings, you’ve most likely waited too long.
In today’s economy there are no experts, no ‘best and brightest’ with all the answers. It’s up to each one of us. The only way to screw up is to not try anything.
Train everyone lavishly. You can’t overspend on training.
The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re wasting your life.
The world has not just “turned upside down”. It is turning in every which way at an accelerating pace.
The dominant culture in most big companies demands punishment for a mistake, no matter how useful, small, invisible...
If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?
Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long shot, weirdo bets?
Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain’t in the mean, the mode or the median – it’s in the differences that occur throughout a population.
How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality.