A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.
The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.
Hire attitude, train skills.
Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.
OPPORTUNITY is not “knocking.” It is pounding on your door.
What you decide not to do is probably more important that what you decide to do.
Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today’s laurels are tomorrow’s compost.
To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening.
Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!
The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.
Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.
Effective visions are lived in details, not broad strokes.
To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.
Life is too short for non-WOW projects.
Lists simplify, clarify, edify.
I believe in the age of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, that relationships are everything.
I wrote the book based on a blog that I keep. I also tweet. I don’t think that for an incredibly old fart I’m totally behind the power curve. I really believe that the essentials of human relationships remain the same.
Had Twitter been invented earlier, my books would have been shorter.
I’m about as far from being a flag-waver – you won’t find any American flag pins in my drawer – as someone can be.