“Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”
— Tom Peters
“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”
“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.”
“Ready, fire, aim. Do it! Make it happen! Action counts. No one ever sat their way to success.”
“Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.”
“Hire attitude train skills.”
“The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.”
“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.”
“Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today’s laurels are tomorrow’s compost.”
“Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.”
“The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.”
“Listen to Everyone. Ideas come from everywhere.”
“Quality involves living the message of the possibility of perfection and infinite improvement, living it day in and day out, decade by decade.”
“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”
“If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?”
“If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”
“Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.”
“In McKinsey’s world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.”
“Do it, fix it, try it.”
“Good managers have a bias for action.”
“A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.”
“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”
“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.”
“It’s this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.”
“Public Speaking is a skill that can be studied, polished, perfected. Not only can you get good at it, you can get damn good at it and it makes a heck of a difference.”
“The dominant culture in most big companies demands punishment for a mistake, no matter how useful, small, invisible...”
“Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
“Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.”
“TRUST, not technology, is the issue of the decade.”
“You will be remembered, in the long haul, for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work. No one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.”
“The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.”
“You can’t live life without an eraser.”
“Smile if it kills you. The physiology of smiling diffuses a lot of anger and angst. It makes your body and soul feel better.”
“Celebrate what you want to see more of.”
“Brand inside is more important than brand outside for sustained success.”
“Have you set high standards in the past that make it clear what level of performance you demand?”
“Communication is everyone’s panacea for everything.”
“Dot the i’s, cross the t’s, answer the phones promptly, send out errorless invoices, and in general never forget that the devil is in the details.”
“The best leaders are the best notetakers, best askers, and best learners.”
“Vision is dandy, but sustainable company excellence comes from a huge stable of able managers.”
“Learning is a matter of intensity not elapsed time.”
“An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader’s premier trait.”
“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.”
“You can’t think your way out of a box; you’ve got to act.”
“There are few things that will take you further in life, than your ability to make a good presentation.”
“The ‘value added’ for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from the Quality of Experience provided.”
“If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you’re nuts to stay there.”
“Leaders do stuff that matters.”
“Hire disrespectful people.”
“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.”
“Don’t ‘tolerate’ mistakes. Embrace them!”
“To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening.”
“If you’re a leader, your whole reason for living is to help human beings develop – to really develop people and make work a place that’s energetic and exciting and a growth opportunity, whether you’re running a Housekeeping Department or Google. I mean, this is not rocket science.”
“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.”
“Forget all the conventional ‘rules’ but one. There is one golden rule: Stick to topics you deeply care about and don’t keep your passion buttoned inside your vest. An audience’s biggest turn-on is the speaker’s obvious enthusiasm. If you are lukewarm about the issue, forget it!”
“I am my clients. I am defined by who I do business with.”
“Knowing when to take your losses is an essential part of eventual success.”
“One percent improvement in 1,000 things is better than 1,000% improvement in one thing.”
“Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!”
“Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead.”
“Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It’s about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it’s about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.”
“Perception is all there is. If the customer think he’s right, he’s right.”
“Swipe from the best, then adapt.”
“Champions are pioneers, and pioneers get shot at. The companies that get the most from champions, therefore, are those that have rich support network so their pioneers will flourish. This point is so important it’s hard to overstress. No support systems, no champions. No champions, no innovations.”
“Quite simply, no matter how hard you try, no matter how “open” you are, you’ll end up surrounded by “yes people.” It’s hard not to believe people who are repeating your own ideas. Resist the temptation.”
“Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long shot, weirdo bets?”
“The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.”
“A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.”
“The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.”
“It’s relatively simple. If we’re not getting more, better, faster than they are getting more, better, faster, then we’re getting less, no better or more worse.”
“How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality.”
“What you decide not to do is probably more important that what you decide to do.”
“Who comes first? Don’t be silly, says King Hal; it’s employees. That is – and this dear Watson, is elementary – if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.”
“Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.”
“The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.”
“If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen.”
“You are who you go to lunch with! Break bread with cool and you will become more cool. Conversely: break bread with dull and well, you can figure it out.”
“The widespread availability of information is the only basis for effective day-to-day problem solving, which abets continuous improvement programs.”
“Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.”
“Listen while you can, so that you can lead when you must.”
“They say plan it. I say do it.”
“I don’t know what it means to manage the human imagination, but I do know that imagination is the main source of value in the new economy. And I know we’d better figure out the answer to my question-quick.”
“The drive for control, or the perception thereof, is truly the strongest force in human nature.”
“Entrepreneurs have no memories. They take on the world with a completely fresh view.”
“If timing ain’t everything, it’s damn close.”
“Effective visions are lived in details, not broad strokes.”
“Creating in all employees the awareness that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the company’s success.”
“If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better-period!”
“Remember: You are the only human being in the world who can help this particular customer at this particular moment in time.”
“Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets.”
“Bold botches are to be cherished.”
“Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation – and about fundamental relations with one’s fellows.”
“Mastery is great, but even that is not enough. You have to be able to change course without a bead of sweat, or remorse.”
“Musing on the phrase ‘waste of time.’ So much more complex than it appears. Many ‘wastes of time’ small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.”
“Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?”
“South Africa has all the tools to compete in the new global village – an eager workforce, ready to take on any challenge.”
“In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.”
“All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.”
“Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven’t got a theory and I haven’t got a framework.”
“I believe in the age of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, that relationships are everything.”
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