Top 30 Jeffrey Pfeffer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Successful organizations understand the importance of implementation, not just strategy, and, moreover, recognize the crucial role of their people in this process.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

2. “You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

3. “Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

4. “Personal growth and professional development require mostly being treated like an adult, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens in most workplaces. People need to be able to make decisions. To do that effectively, they need information and training in how to use it.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

5. “Knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

6. “So, the three qualities of a workplace that would develop people would be information sharing, investing in the training of the workforce, and giving employees the ability to use their training and information to make decisions.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

7. “Being memorable equals getting picked.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

8. “When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

9. “Advocates of knowledge management as the next big thing have advanced the proposition that what companies need is more intellectual capital. While that is undeniably true, its only partly true. What those advocates are forgetting is that knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

10. “You are more likely to acquire power by narrowing your focus and applying your energies, like the sun’s rays, to a limited range of activities in a small number of domains.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

11. “People will envy you to the extent that you start out with a group of people and you rise up the organization faster than them. Get over what your peers are thinking about you because your peers are also your competitors.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

12. “People who don’t have as much power as they would like often begin by attributing their difficulties to the environment – competitors, bosses, economic circumstances, and so forth. But in reality people are customarily their own biggest impediment to being as powerful as they would like.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

13. “I am increasingly convinced that people who have power are not necessarily smarter than others. Beyond a certain level of intelligence and level in the hierarchy, everyone is smart. What differentiates people is their political skill and savvy.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

14. “With respect to trust, people tell me that it is essential for organizational functioning. Maybe, but most surveys of trust find that trust in leaders is low and nonetheless, organizations role along quite nicely.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

15. “Point at solutions instead of at each other.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

16. “Believing that the world is fair, people fail to note the various land mines in the environment that can undermine their careers.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

17. “Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives. In fact, many good political biographies are useful in learning about power, strategy, and decision-making.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

18. “Volumes in the series on Lyndon Johnson, including Master of the Senate and The Path Power, describe how Johnson created resources out of nothing and built a substantial power base.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

19. “Almost no one as I think most leadership books are a joke. They are, as I note in Leadership BS, frequently based on wishes and hopes rather than reality, on inspiring stories rather than systematic social science, and on “oughts” rather than “is.””

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

20. “Nortel – another troubled networking company that suffered operating problems as a result of botched mergers.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

21. “Leaders are not modest, and more importantly, the extensive social science research on narcissism, self-promotion, and similar constructs shows that these qualities and behaviors are useful for getting hired, achieving promotions, keeping one’s job, and obtaining a higher salary.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

22. “Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a wonderful substitute for thinking.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

23. “I am not sure any of the material in Leadership BS would be helpful for small companies and certainly not their owners. Of course, even owners have bosses and need to worry about keeping their jobs – so Power might be more appropriate.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

24. “My overall recommendation: for decades corporate policy manuals and HR departments have told people they are responsible for their own careers. It’s about time people really heeded those warnings.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

25. “Witness Donald Trump’s current presidential campaign. So first people need to find the white spaces, the unexploited or underexploited niches where there is less competition and more opportunity.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

26. “Deming argued that if there are performance problems and quality defects, one needs to understand how those problems arise almost naturally as a consequence of how a system has been designed – and then fix those design flaws. Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system – whether or not they deserved it.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

27. “One study of relatively highly paid contractors in Silicon Valley found that free agents didn’t really feel free because of the need to be always searching for their next gig and therefore frequently took less leisure time than regular employees.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

28. “Trust is about keeping commitments, but in many instances, circumstances change and organizations therefore shed commitments, things such as retiree medical benefits, pension obligations, and even employees without much remorse or maybe even hesitation.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

29. “Most organisations say they want creativity, but really they do not.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

30. “The class focuses intensely on making people more comfortable with doing a wider range of things – such as networking, self-promotion, building their own personal brand, cleverly acquiring resources, getting known – that they may have been less comfortable with before.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

31. “If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

32. “Asian professionals are frequently held back from senior positions by the perception that they don’t have “executive presence,” a factor that similarly operates against other minority groups in the workplace, including women.39 And what constitutes executive presence? Certainly not modesty:.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

33. “No one who is unmemorable is going to be chosen for an important job, because one cannot select what one cannot remember.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

34. “Using both experiments and field data, a recent study found that economic insecurity was associated with increased consumption of painkillers and produced actual physical pain and reduced pain tolerance, with the absence of control providing one mechanism explaining these results.”

— Jeffrey Pfeffer