There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to bedone. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.
The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.
Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.
True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"
Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.
If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space.The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.
Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time.
The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.
People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
I think the growth industry of the future in this country and the world will soon be the continuing education of adults. ...I think the educated person of the future is somebody who realizes the need to continue to learn. That is the new definition and it is going to change the world we live in and work in.
The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.
People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'
Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.
Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.
By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.
Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.
No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.
What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.
Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
The real achiever do one thing at a time.
The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.
To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon.
People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.
Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.
Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.
If you want to know what the future is, be part of its development.
The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit.
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.
Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.
The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.
Leadership is more doing than dash.
The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.
It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.
The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers
Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.
Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.
Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
