Management Consultant Quotes

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.

Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.

Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.

The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

If you want to improve how you manage time - stop doing what doesn't need to be done!

(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.

Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.

Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

[Management] has authority only as long as it performs.

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

The best plan is only a plan... unless it degerates into work.

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. This is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.

The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.

Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

If you can't measure it, you can't change it.

The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, "We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

The fault is in the system and not in the men.

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.