A
collection of thought provokers and quotations published in
Cuttings
* The Toyota suggestion scheme nets almost
2,000,000 suggestions per year, 33 per worker. What is
more, 95% of these are implemented. That makes about 5,000
improvements per day, 365 days per year.
* Matsushita have monthly senior management meetings to
vision what the company will be like in 200 years.
* Sign outside Stew Leonard’s store at Norwark, Connecticut
(carved in granite)
Rule#1 - The Customer is always right
Rule#2 - If the customer is ever wrong, refer to Rule#1
* "People don’t give you their trust and respect. They only
loan it to you" Bill Terrell
* In 1930, 94% of all the cars in Japan were American made
* Thanks to Charlotte, daughter of Ros Southcott for
finding this:
The Leader (Roger McGough, Sky in the Pie, Puffin)
I wanna be the leader / I wanna be the leader / Can I be
the leader? / Can I? I can? / Promise? Promise? / Yippee,
I’m the leader / I’m the leader / OK what shall we do?
* Philips in Washington have increased productivity by 53%
through flexible manufacturing lines manned by autonomous
work teams.
* "Customers carry out competitive benchmarking all the
time" - Paul Spenley, Pera International
* "If a team works together, it doesn't matter how large
the company gets, you still have team spirit" - Ron
Pemberton, Senior Shop Steward, Toshiba, Plymouth
* J Edgar Hoover is reported to have insisted on signing
off every decision, even to the width of borders on FBI
memos - one day he received a memo with margins too small
on which he scrawled in red ink "Watch the borders". The
next day 200 FBI agents were despatched to Canada and
Mexico!
* Seen in a Job Centre in Kelso, Scotland:
WANTED: Apprentice mechanic for garage in Coldstream. Must
be experienced.
* WASTE - Anything other than the minimum amount of
equipment, materials, space and worker’s time required to
add value to the product" - Toyota
* "If your heart operated at 99.9%, you would be in cardiac
arrest for almost nine hours a year" John Akers, IBM
* Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight -
Thomas Carlyle
* If you don’t see the potential, you can’t realise it
* "My chief job is to constantly stir or rekindle the
curiosity of people that gets driven out by bureaucracy and
formal schooling" Akio Morita, Chairman, Sony
* Reasons for losing customers from a US government survey
1% Die
3% Move away
5% Other friendships
9% Competitive reasons
14% Dissatisfaction with product or service
68% Attitude of indifference by some employee
* "Nissan cars made in England by Englishmen under British
management are equal in quality to those made by Nissan in
Japan." Wall Street Journal
* 70% of American workers are afraid to speak up with
suggestions or to ask for clarification - American Quality
Foundation
* In Japanese, the same word - okyakusama - means
"customer" and "honourable guest".
* Too busy developing your career to visit your parents? In
Japan you can rent actors who will take your place,
charging $385 for a five hour visit by a ‘son’ or
‘daughter’, $769 for a couple and $1,155 if a baby or child
is included. (Fortune June 29, 1992)
* Britain is the most dangerous place to work in Europe. 2
people are killed and 3,500 seriously injured on an average
day.
* Innovation and speed are the keys to success - CBI
* At Southwest Airlines in the US, frequent fliers get
birthday cards and are also used on interview panels for
prospective flight attendants.
* "The old ways of doing things no longer apply" - Akio
Morita, Chairman, Sony
* "It is difficult to organise a march of elephants and
insects in the same direction. However careful the
elephants are, the insects get crushed." From a brew master
at the Budweiser brewery in the former Czechoslovakia,
commenting on the rumoured ‘merger’ with its US namesake
* I am grateful for one of our champions, Børge
Thorbjørnsen of Statoil for the following equation of
training:
Effective Learning = Right person X Right course X Right
time X Right environment.
So if any one part is 0 then whole sum is 0
* Continuous improvement is becoming a condition of
survival in internationally competitive markets - Economist
Intelligence Unit
* Bench marking is a perfectly legal way of copying the
smartest business practices of your competitors.
* "Managing a service business through internal reports is
like playing tennis while keeping your eyes on the
scoreboard." Isadore Sharp, CEO Four Seasons Hotels
* "The person who knows something can’t be done should get
out of the way of the person bent on doing it."
* ‘The most inspiring mission statement will mean little if
the Chief Executive ducks the first tough challenge.’
* "I’d cut the centre to ribbons; I’d delegate heavily; I’d
unbundle the constituentparts; I’d want a loose,
experimental, open, non-hierarchial set-up– and very
high-demanding in terms of achievement" Sir John
Harvey-Jones
* China’s first consumer protection law makes the death
penalty possible for anyone making or selling shoddy or
fake goods.
* "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* "In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups,
parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." Frederich
Nietzsche
* "All you have to lose is the fear of letting go" Ricardo
Semler
* "We’ve been doing business process re-engineering for
years, except we called it survival." Tom O’Neill, Managing
Director, Barr & Stroud Ltd
* "We have all experienced organisations wanting to take us
from the cradle to the grave—and some who wanted to speed
up that process." David Burgon, Sanders & Sidney plc.
* The reality is that employees treat customers exactly the
way that their managers treat them.
* "Everyone in the organisation is a high potential person"
- Lars Kolind, Oticon, Denmark
* "Organisations are a network of learning curves"-Andrew
Mayo
* "British Airways would never allow any of their pilots to
fly a 747 without a considerable time in a flight
simulator. Yet we find it often acceptable to let our
managers fly our companies by trial and error" - Arie de
Geus
* "Managing change goes wrong when a worried top management
tries to implement a solution in an organisation which
doesn’t understand the problem" - Paul Evans, ISEAD, France
* "People make the difference" - John Rankin, Kraft Jacobs
Suchard, Switzerland
* "The speed of sustainable change is always less than the
speed of learning" - Nigel Freedman, Philips, the
Netherlands
* People don’t learn on the job, they learn through
challenge–and most jobs aren’t challenging" - Paul Evans,
ISEAD, France
* The Noah Principle: Predicting rain doesn’t count -
building arks counts - John Ferguson, Royal Bank of
Scotland
* Managers do things right–Leaders do the right thing -
Warren Bennis
* Long term Planning is a dream with a deadline - Walter
Wriston, Citicorp
* The journey is every bit as important as the arrival -
Chris Bonnington
* "In Sweden an invoice is something you pay. In Italy it
is something you re-negotiate. (You) must take the local
culture into account."–Keith Bater, Rank Xerox.
* "You manage processes but you lead human beings."–Heinz
Fischer, Hewlett Packard.
* "It absolutely astonishes me the way people get promoted
who are clearly barmy and dangerous."– Alistair Mant.
* Job turnover in Britain is the highest in Europe, with
average tenure of just over six years–yet fewer than a
quarter of companies carry out formal exit interviews.
* "Misunderstandings don’t exist - only the failure to
communicate" - Asian proverb
* OO + NT = EOO (Old Organisation + New Technology =
Expensive Old Organisation) - quoted in The David Newton
Consultancy newsletter
* Strategic thinking, responding to and managing change,
and orientation to total quality/customer satisfaction are
the three key skills for management into the millennium -
IM survey 1994
* Downsizing has no real effect on increasing profits and
two thirds of respondents lost faith in their employers
according to surveys by De Meuse and Cascio.
* The Shell/Esso agreement for their North Sea co-venture
is set out on a few A4 pages but is not normally consulted
- personal relationships are more important than formal
documentation. - Dave Carr, Production Manager, Esso.
* "Every few years you have to grab the organisation by the
collar and jerk it around a bit and get it steering off in
new directions" - Gary Hamel, London Business School
* It is a serious mistake to assume that there is a single
type of team person. What is needed is a mix of types. -
People Management, February 1995
* "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller who is
foreign." Robert Louis Stevenson
* Formal appraisal procedures do not improve performance
and, in many cases, have a negative effect - Prof. Jerry
Harvey
* Three-quarters of the US Fortune 500 are using 360-degree
feedback, but aimed at future development rather than past
performance.
* If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take
you there. - Sioux proverb
* The obscure we see eventually. The completely apparent
takes longer.
* Flat organisations still need authority.
* Customers don’t want a choice, they want exactly what
they want.
* "They were born executives. What they meant was Daddy
owns the company." Mirror Group Newspapers
* "If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No
use being a damn fool about it." W.C.Fields
* "Clients want an account executive who is between 25 and
30, with 40 years’ experience." Jason Callender
* ... in the same vein, I recently heard a 48 year old
out-of-work executive saying "think of me as an 18 year old
with 30 years’ experience."
* "You can fool all of the people all of the time if the
advertising is right and the budget is big enough." Joseph
E Levine
* "My observations suggest that the more successful the
businessman, the more unethical the behaviour." Newsweek
*
* "Why can’t executives earning $100,000 a year afford to
buy their own cars?" "You don’t understand" respond the
experts "it’s not a case of affording, it’s a question of
being loved." Fortune
* "It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is
to use it well." Rene Descartes
* We will build good ships here, at a profit if we can, at
a loss if we must, but always good ships. Mission
statement, Newport News Shipbuilding
* "A new idea gets a champion or it dies." Ed Schein
* "The key to competitiveness is education and
re-education." Percy Barnevik, ABB
* "A new born baby doubles its weight every three months.
You soon realise that you don’t want this trend to
continue. You need to develop new business strategies and
measures." Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Corp.
* Four Seasons hotels arrange for local retailers to open
early so you can buy a complete wardrobe before your
meeting should your luggage be lost, damaged, or you are
called back from vacation.
* The five types of listening: Ignoring, Pretending,
Selective, Attentive, Empathetic. Stephen Covey
* If "people are our greatest asset" why are they not
reflected on the balance sheet? Bob Garratt
* Loyalty isn’t a valid term any more, but it is vital to
have commitment, and that will work only if it is mutual.
CEO, First Direct Bank
* If employees see top management promoting distinctive
values but behaving differently, then they will stop
trusting the top people. Andrew Kakabadse
* "Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have
the sensation that the entire operating team is a single
organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as a
‘ballet’ in which the individual is subordinated to the
group performance, and all share in a feeling of harmony
and power" Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
* "Life will never be easy, or sure, or perfect. Best
understood back-wards, we have to live it forwards - with
all its contradictions. There is a paradox at the heart of
things. The challenge the future is to find a pathway
through the paradoxes." Charles Handy
* Good judgement comes from on experience - experience
comes from poor judgement.
* The best measure of the success of any communication is
found in the response - not in the intent.
* Personnel - Assets with feet.
* The employee’s responsibility is to manage her or his own
career. The employer’s responsibility is to provide
employees with the opportunities fro assessing and
developing their skills. Institute of Management Report
June 1995
* When in charge - ponder, When in trouble - delegate, When
in doubt - mumble
* Opportunity is something more people would recognise if
it didn’t come disguised as hard work. Changing Times
Magazine
* Judgement is what you do when you don’t (and can’t) know
what to do, but you sense you must do something quickly.
* "If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three." Dr.
Laurence J Peter
* From a shop in Lausanne
L’urgent est déjà fait
L’impossible est en train de se faire
Pour les miracles, veuillez vous addresser au Seigneur
* ...in similar vein from Sheila Rimmer
Unmögliches erledigen wir sofort
Wunder dauern etwas länger
auf Wunsch kann auch gehext werden.
* "Girls had it good. They got to stay indoors. Boys had to
run around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh,
fighting wars for made up reasons, while girls played with
dolls, creating complex family groups and learning how to
solve problems through negotiation and role playing. Which
gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult
life, would you guess?" Garrison Keillor, The Book of Guys
* "We don’t really know how to do reengineering in our
company, so what we do is we regularly down-size the
company and leave it to the three people who are left to
figure out how to do their work differently." James Champy
interview
* The first 100 days in a new role are critical in
determining long term success or failure of managers,
especially in interpersonal skills, yet only seven per cent
of companies provide appropriate role change support and a
quarter provide no support at all. survey by GHN Ltd
* Career oriented Japanese executives hire outside
investigators to find out what their bosses think of their
performance and potential.
* "People rust out a lot faster than they wear out." Don
Feigenbaum
* People never forget they way they are treated when they
are made redundant - and neither do their friends and
colleagues
* What’s the best that can happen?
* "Companies will pay millions of dollars for the opinions
of McKinsey’s 29 year old. What about listening to their
own 29 year olds? When was the last time someone in their
20s spent time with the board?" Gary Hamel
* "I do not agree with companies that prefer to wait for
better days" Percy Barnevik, CEO ABB
* "If we had similar progress in computer and automotive
technology, today you could buy a Lexus for about $2. It
would travel at the speed of sound, and go about 600 miles
on a thimble of gas." Randall Tobias, AT&T
* Discover what people do well and then ask them to do more
of it - Todd Mansfield, Disney
* The Japanese have a word for death by overwork - karoshi
* At Southwest Airlines in the USA, frequent flyers
participate in selection panels for front-line staff
* Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds that
organisations’ employment practices are encouraging staff
to operate in an individualistic and competitive manner.
* A quarter of personnel managers believe their
organisations’ pay system is not rewarding performance.
Industrial Society
* "No matter how absurd I try to make my comic strip, I
can’t stay ahead of what people are experiencing in their
own workplace." Scott Adams
* The Fish Rots from the Head (the latest book from Bob
Garrett)
* "As with alcoholism, there is no known cure for stage
fright. You’re either a ‘chronic’ sufferer or ‘recovering’
sufferer." Aram Bakshian, Jr.
* "All too often, change is simply a code word for
something nasty." Gary Hamel
* "To hear the unheard is a necessary discipline to be a
good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen
closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings
uncommunicated, pins unexpressed and complaints not spoken
of, can he hope to inspire confidence in his people,
understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs
of his citizens. The demise of states comes when leaders
listen only to superficial words and do not penetrate
deeply into the souls of the people to hear their true
opinions, feelings and desires." Pan Ku quoted by Sergio
Hillesheim at the 1996 World Congress of Personnel
Management Associations in Hong Kong
* "Why concern yourself with expenses incurred on business
trip? If you can’t trust an employee to manage her/his
expenses, how can you trust them to manage infinitely more
important business?" Ricardo Semler
* "In industry after industry, the terrain is changing so
fast that experience is irrelevant and even dangerous."
Gary Hamel
* "I have never seen a man on his death bed say ‘I wish I’d
spent more time at the office.’" Senator Paul Tsongas
* "Who says you can’t change the world." Motto for Earth
Day
* "Teams are the Italian performance cars of the workplace:
high performance, but requiring high maintenance, high
attention and high expense." Bulletpoint
* "92.4 per cent of UK directors have no formal training or
development for the job." Institute of Directors report.
* "When was the last time a Generation-X employee in your
company exchanged ideas with senior managers?" Gary Hamel
* "We don’t stop having fun when we are old. We’re old when
we stop having fun." Faith Popcorn
* "Of course I don’t do anything. I’m an idea man."
* "Listen to people in truly great companies talk about
their achievements–you will hear little about earnings per
share." HBR
* Cone Mills is the sole supplier to Levi Strauss of 501
fabric – with only a gentleman’s agreement.
* "Strategic analysis and choice are of little value unless
the strategies are capable of being implemented." Johnson
& Scholes
* "When quality and image issues are tended to, volume,
share and profits will follow." Coca Cola
* "A smile is when both corners of your mouth go up at the
same time." Vladimir Soloviev
* "It is only when you work with, rather than against,
people that achievement and lasting success is possible."
John Harvey-Jones
* "Good enough never is." Carl Sewell
* "I would not advise anyone to stay in the pool of mud."
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
* Customer satisfaction starts with employee satisfaction.
* "Luck is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity
meet." Richard Nelson Bolles
* "There are no profit centres, just cost centres. Profit
comes from the outside. When a customer returns with a
repeat order and her or his cheque doesn’t bounce, you have
a profit centre." Peter Drucker
* Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your
way.
* "The aim of reviewing the subordinate’s performance is to
increase his effectiveness, not to punish him." Rensis
Likert, 1959
* "Managing is not a series of mechanical tasks but a set
of human interactions." Thomas Teal
* "Anyone who sits on boards knows that the amount of time
devoted to subjects is inversely proportional to their
importance. The reason? People can only debate things they
understand". Ricardo Semler
* "You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t
possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." Sam
Levenson
* "No-one can make you think what you think." Tony Buzan
* "I don’t know what world-class really means. I do know
that I expect to be able to taste it and feel it when I get
there." Hugh Aitken, Sun Microsystems
* "A lot of people who run companies would do it better if
they were way from the office in the mornings. It’s about
strategic thinking." comment on Frank Williams, of the
Willams F1 team.
* "People fix companies, buzzwords don’t." Al Dunlap
* "Speaking the same language doesn’t mean two people
understanding each other." Yves-Noël Derenne, Eurotunnel
* "Frontline people shape the customer’s experience."
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
* "The truth of what I say should be told by what I do."
William Pollard
* "Practice makes permanent, it does not make perfect. You
can practice all you like, but you will just stay within
your own boundaries. To improve you have to compete with
the very best. Until then you are just deluding yourself."
Keith Antione, Olympic coach
* 89% of employers still believe that staff work mainly for
money, with only 11% thinking that job satisfaction came
into the equation. Employees however look for interest and
enjoyment first, then security and a sense of achievement,
with pay coming fourth on their priority list. Survey by
Director magazine
* "The human brain starts working the moment you are born
and never stops until you stand up to speak in public." Sir
George Jessel
* "Western managers are becoming extraordinarily timid". S.
Ghoshal
* The only people in life who welcome change are wet
babies.
* 4 per cent of problems are known to top managers; 9 per
cent to middle managers; 74 per cent to first line
supervisors and 100 per cent to the rank and file employee.
* "The more threatening a problem to those responsible for
solving it, the deeper it will become ingrained under
ramifying layers of camouflage" Mike Dixon
* "We have to have experts to find answers to the difficult
questions, but what I am interested in is who is going to
ask the right bloody questions." Reg Revans
* "Or to put it another way, Malcolm, if we train you to be
‘employable’ we won’t feel so bad if we kick you out "–
Cartoonist Gary
* "The most useful employees to organisations are those
acting out of a sense of being free agents. They are there
primarily because they want to be there, and recognise that
they must support themselves, not waiting for the annual
appraisal to propose timely solutions to emerging needs."
Nella Barkley, Crystal-Barkley
* CONSULTANT (n.): A person who knows less than you do
about every aspect of your business except one: how to run
it better. Thomas A. Stewart, Fortune
* Why is the right size always smaller?
* Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil has 1,250 performers and
staff who come from 17 countries, speak 13 languages and
are scattered across the globe in troupes from Las Vegas to
Latvia – and we think we have logistics and communications
problems!!
* "How is it that I can get a group of intelligent
colleagues into a room and they add up to one idiot?"
quoted from a multinational CEO
* "The first people had questions, and they were free. The
second people had answers, and they became enslaved"
WindEagle
* "I only work with my friends. If a client is not a friend
to begin with, she or he is a friend soon enough." Philmore
Hart
* "Do what you love, the money will follow."
* "Always listen carefully to experts. They will tell you
what you can’t do. Then do it." Robert A. Heinlein
* If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always
get what you’ve always got.
* ‘If you have built castles in the air, your work need not
be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them.’ Henry David Thoreau
* "We acknowledge that failure is a part of life. And we
expect failure on a grand scale. For every 1,000 ideas, 100
are written up as formal proposals, a fraction of these
become new product ventures, and more than half of our new
product ventures fail." William Coyne, senior
vice-president, 3M
* To be employed is to be at risk. To be employable is
security.
* ‘You think because you understand one you must understand
two, because one and one makes two. But you must also
understand and.’ Sufi saying
* ‘Many large organisations have a talent for taking in
enthusiastic, committed and hopeful people and turning
them, unwittingly and over time, into hostile, cynical and
hopeless people.’ George Binney & Colin Williams
‘Leaning into the Future’
* ‘The most powerful and influential tool effective
facilitators bring into a room is themselves.’ Richard
Weaver & John Farrell ‘Managers as Facilitators’
* ‘It’s not enough to work conscientiously. No matter what
kind of job, you should think of yourself as being
completely in charge of and responsible for your work.’
Konosuke Matsushita
* In Hong Kong, the word for mobile phone literally
translates as ‘little Big Brother’, and today it is a sign
of status to work for a company that does not supply one to
you.
* One quarter of the world’s trained engineers are in
Russia.
* "There is no risk of losing, only a risk of winning. You
don’t have to concentrate and train to lose!" Frank Dick
* "If you are not improving operational effectiveness, you
are gradually going out of business." Michael Porter
* "Experts can explain anything in the objective world to
us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In
short, we live in the post modern world where everything is
possible and almost nothing is certain... The artificial
world order of the past has collapsed and a new, more just
order has not yet emerged. The central political task of
the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a
new model of coexistence among the various cultures,
peoples, races and religious spheres within a single
interconnected civilisation." Vaclav Havel
* "Asia-Pacific has to be part of our daily lives, not just
an annual business trip." Percy Barnevik
* 41 per cent say their organisation tries to link pay to
performance, but only half of those affected say the
prospect of more pay motivates them to work harder. IPD
Report
* "Machines can’t give you a competitive advantage. It’s
all about the people." Wharton study report
* "The search for sustainable advantage is leading to the
squishy softness of culture." Fortune article
* "The critical resource is now people and the knowledge
they carry". Arie de Geus
* "3M innovates for the same reason cows eat grass–because
it’s part of our DNA to do so." George Allen
* "We steal best practices shamelessly from everyone."
Chief Executive, Royal Mail
* "The first step toward restoring organisational vitality
is to engage every employee in the company’s principal
challenges. Employees must understand where the enterprise
is going and have some say in its destiny." Richard Pascale
* Toyota USA maintains a 10 million name database of owners
with 120 variables per household, and generates one major
direct marketing project per day from it.
* A dog food company’s new product wasn’t selling. The big
boss called his senior staff together. The heads of
finance, packaging, pricing, advertising, promotion and
distribution all claimed they had done everything right and
were not to blame. "Why doesn’t it sell?" demanded the
boss. To which a timid junior executive replied: "Sir, dogs
won’t eat it."
* Companies who give equal priority to investors, customers
and employees are more successful than those who put
shareholders first. They achieved four times more revenue
growth, created eight times more jobs and achieved twelve
times more share price appreciation over a 10 year period.
Harvard study by John Kotter & James Hesketh
* Two-thirds of graduate recruits do not have essential
interpersonal skills (oral and written communication, team
working, listening and problem solving). Study by People
Management/Austin Knight
* "It is absurd to claim to be customer focused and then
have dominant measures focus on short term profits."
Frederick Reichheld
* "The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The
secret of getting started is breaking complex overwhelming
tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the
first one." Mark Twain
* "Success is 99 percent failure." Soichiro Honda
* A stumbling block to strategic planning: Senior
professionals in organisations want autonomy not
collaboration. Cranfield Management School research
* 60 percent of junior and middle managers feel they are in
the dark about their organisations’ strategies. 40 percent
of junior managers consider senior management are poor
communicators. Institute of Management report
* The ability to inspire trust, visioning and the ability
and willingness to listen are rated above strategic
thinking, problem solving and entrepreneurial skills in a
survey of leaders in London’s financial sector. Amin Rajan/
CREATE research
* "The general must focus on the heart and not the mind
when managing troops. He cannot rely on material benefits
to motivate them. He must appeal to their pride and
loyalty." Sun Tzu
* "If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the
shade." Tom Peters
* The Dilbert Principle: The most ineffective employees are
systematically moved to the place where they can do the
least damage – management. Scott Adams
* "Speeches are like babies; easy to conceive but difficult
to deliver." Larry Wilde
* "The only function of economic forecasting is to make
astrology look respectable." Ezra Solomon
* At the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco, everyone -
bellhops and housekeeping staff included - can spend up to
$2,000 to fix a customer’s approval.
* "GE’s goal is not to become smaller but to get the
small-company soul and small-company speed inside our
big-company body." Jack Welch
* In Britain, workers for foreign companies are 45 percent
more productive than workers for domestic companies. Since
the pool of work force is the same, the difference must be
the superior management ability of the foreign companies.
Competing in the Third Wave, Jeremy & Tony Hope
* "Nobody at the top is smart enough to know everything.
The manager who says ‘I make all the decisions’ is a fool."
Ken Olsen
* 'Performance related pay' is an anagram of 'mere end of
year claptrap'. Peter Cottrell in People Management
* "There are too many senior managers - including chief
executives - who can walk into a room and nobody notices."
Mike Meldrum, Cranfield
* " I was talking to the chief executive of one company and
asked him: how would you describe the culture of your
organisation? He said: "Seven years ago it was dog eat dog.
Now it's the other way around."" Amin Rajan
* "We are the protagonists and authors of our own drama. It
is up to us; there is no one left to blame. Neither the
system, not our leaders, nor our parents. We can't go out
and hang the first amoeba." Rebecca McClen Novick
* Ogden Nash:
"He who whispers down a well / About the wares he has to
sell / Will not make as many dollars / As he who climbs a
hill and hollers."
• "The amount of time spent on a project is not what
counts: it's the amount of uninterrupted time. Few problems
can resist an all out attack; few can be solved piecemeal."
Bliss, Getting Things Done via Ken Tombs
* Thought for the day: A bus station is where a bus stops;
A train station is where a train stops; On my desk I have a
workstation...
* "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any
invention in human history with the possible exceptions of
handguns and tequila." Mitch Ratliffe
* "The challenge today is not the global economy but the
instant economy." Gary Hamel
* "Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some
five balls in the air. You name them: work, family, health,
friends and spirit; and you're keeping all of these in the
air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball.
If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four
balls-family, health, friends and spirit-are made of glass.
If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed,
marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never
be the same. You must understand that and strive for
balance in your life." Executive, Coca-Cola
* "By the year 2010, diversity will be a fact of life for
the top management teams of multinational corporations. A
major shift to emerging markets will mean 30% to 40% of
their top teams coming from China, India, and Brazil." C.K.
Prahalad & K. Lieberthal
* "Here's a test to find out whether your mission on earth
is finished. If you are alive, it isn't." Richard Bach
* "The degree of incompetence is staggering. Many CEOs are
afraid of computers, some are unable to even read their own
email without help. Only a minority use the Internet or
company Intranets regularly, while more than 25% manage to
entirely avoid using either." Prabhu Guptara
* The six most important words in working life:
'I admit I made a mistake'
The five most important words:
'You did a good job'
The four most important words
'If you please'
The two most important words:
'Thank you'
The most important word:
'We'
* We all have comfort zones that are several sizes too
small.
* According to a study of 622 top executives a clear
majority say annual vacations are "essential" to keeping
their job performance up and maintaining a positive state
of mind in both their personal lives (68%) and at work
(63%). Vacation time is so import-ant that 70% would keep
their vacation if offered a 10% raise for one week of their
vacation time. Spreadsheets to Sunshine: Executives on
Vacation, Roper Starch Worldwide
* Men are 40 times more likely to interrupt than women
during a conversation between a man and a woman
* "Although we hate to admit it, we generally have good
people and poor leaders." Aubrey Woodfolk, General Motors
* "It's not enough to just cram more knowledge into
people's heads. The company itself must learn. We have to
do more than merely spend more on training and education."
Arie de Geus
* "All our imagery comes from the military or sport where
it's about the will to win and avoiding defeat. Instead, I
want to use the image of symphonia which means coming
together." Benjamin Zander
* "It's often difficult to distinguish a vision from the
ego of the CEO." Gary Hamel
* "What do 13 people in Seattle know that we don't?" Ross
Perot when offered Microsoft in 1980
* "Unless we have a category in our minds we cannot see or
hear what is happening." Benjamin Zander
* PETsMART stores are increasing the employment of over-50s
as customers appreciate their maturity and experience. The
Times
* "Being a conductor is not about dominating my players,
but releasing their ability." Benjamin Zander
* Our motto is 'screw it, let's do it'. Virgin Group
* "I've never heard the Chairman talk about shareholder
returns. He's always talking about the customer." Charles
Schwab
* We do fundamental strategic thinking every two to three
years involving hundreds of people over a six month period.
Monsanto
* "When I meet my maker and she says 'What have you done
with your life?', I want to say something more than 20%
ROE." Monsanto senior executive
* "We don't talk about market share because when people
talk about market share they are defining their market too
narrowly". GE Capital
* 86% of consumers (94% in the 25-34 age group) expect a
better service and 56% complain more than they did 5 years
ago; 55% now say service is more important than price in
the purchasing decision, and 82% would switch supplier if
not satisfied. NOP
* "The manager maintains while the leader develops; where
the manager relies on control, the leader inspires trust."
Warren Bennis
* "You start with the perception that the world is an
unlimited opportunity. Then the question becomes 'How are
we going to rebuild the planet?'" Bill Strickland
* "I believe-and we've seen ample proof of this-that any
group of minds is better than any individual mind. Our job
is to harness the brainpower we have." Ronald Davidowski,
DPR Construction
* "Failure is just part of the culture of innovation.
Accept it and become stronger." Albert Yu, V.P., Intel
* The best leaders spend 20% of their time creating a
vision for the future. Cranfield School of Management study
* Two-thirds of employees in the UK's biggest companies
feel undervalued, uninvolved and lack confidence in their
leaders. MORI Research
* "Family-friendly workplaces with parents allowed time
with their children, flexible working hours and well paid
part-time jobs are the way of the future." Lord Irvine
* "24 hours in a day...24 beers in a case...coincidence?"
Steven Wright
* "You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn
to walk, to run, to climb, to dance." Friedrich Nietzsche
* Four-fifths of employers still use CV and interviews as
the basis for choosing managers, despite the study data
that show that this is little better than random selection.
IPD research
* "Communication is in the mind of the recipient: you’re
just making noise if the other person doesn’t hear you" Jay
Sidhu, CEO Sovereign Bank
* At Xerox Service, teams with the authority to make
decisions on work allocation and customer problems without
interference from leaders strongly outperform those who do
not.
* At Philips there is a value of Proudly Found Elsewhere
that replaces Not Invented Here.
* "Nothing undermines openness more surely than certainty."
Peter Senge
* I know you believe that you understand what you think I
said, however I am not sure you realise that what I said is
not what I meant.
* "That’s the way things become clear. / All of a sudden. /
And then you realise / how obvious they’ve been all along."
Madeline L’Engle
* "People who seem to have a new idea have often simply
stopped having an old idea." Edwin Land
* In an experiment, Dow Europe cut its office paper use by
30% in six weeks by simply discouraging unneeded
information
* "If you think you can run your business in the next 10
years the way you’ve run it in the past 10 years, you’re
crazy." Robert Goizueta, CEO Coca Cola
* "When we love our work ... we don't have to be managed by
force or fear. We can build systems that facilitate
creativity, rather than be preoccupied with checks and
controls on people who are motivated to beat or exploit the
system. I believe that everyone wants to find both quality
and love in work." Warren Bennis
* "One of the principal problems modern CEOs face is
isolation. You get surrounded by gate-keepers who have this
enormous power because they're the ones filtering the
information to you. So you've got to break away from your
gate-keepers. You've got to set a mood, an environment in
which innovation and creativity can exist and is rewarded
in kind of a public way." William C. Steere Jr. CEO Pfizer,
Inc.
* "Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in her book, The Change
Masters (l983) that although GM was the first automaker to
offer different colored cars, if they hadn't invented
consumer credit it wouldn't have mattered because nobody
would have been able to afford to buy one." J.P. Donlon,
* "The new ways of working are now so different that
technology has paradoxically enhanced the role of people
skills. Senior managers need a range of leadership
capabilities such as strategic thinking and visioning.
Their staff are expected to be more self-driven, resilient
and articulate." Professor Amin Rajan
* By 2002, the shift of employment in the financial sector
in the UK will affect 25% of the workforce and involve the
loss of 100,000 managerial jobs and the recruitment of
60,000 IT and business specialists. Competing through
Skills report by CREATE
* People who get 6 or fewer
hours of sleep a night have a 70% higher mortality rate.
* "The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts
into your mind, but how to get old ones out." Dee Hock
* "We are moving from a world of atoms into one of bits"
Nicholas Negrponte
* "We are always 18 months away from failure" Bill Gates
* Coors beer slogan "Turn it loose" was translated into
Spanish where it read as "Suffer from diarrhoea."
* Next to poor earnings results, inability to deal with
serious people problems is the biggest cause of the failure
of CEOs according to a Fortune study.
* Birds fly in flocks by following three simple rules:
Don’t bump into anything; Keep up: Stay close. - Computer
simulation
* Leaders know how o listen musically as well as
analytically. Ronald Heifetz
* "We need to think less like managers and more like
biologists" Peter Senge
* "Too many people separate the act of leadership from the
leader. They see leadership as something that they do
rather than as an expression of who they are." Kevin
Cashman
* "The most important thing a captain can do is see the
ship from the eyes of his crew" Commander Michael
Abrashoff, USS Benfold
* It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to
mediocrity than to improve from first rate performance to
excellence. Peter Drucker
* "The twentieth century was the age of the machine; the
twenty-first century will be the age of people" Rosabeth
Moss Kanter
* "To achieve maximum effectiveness, knowledge must be
systematically accumulated, shared and purposefully
deployed in building core competencies of the firm. It will
mean, for example, providing frontline workers with instant
access to important information about customers so that
their needs can be satisfied and their problems solved
quickly." Tony Hope, INSEAD
* "Ignoring people development is not an option for any
business. If you want to bring the best out in people you
must invest in them, believe in them and trust them to
respond." Jean Tomlin, Prudential
* "The one thing we don't want people to do when they get
stuck is put their heads down and work harder." Tom Kelley,
IDEO
* "A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you
fail to make the turn." Chris Paine, AppNet LA
* "Top management has to give up its monopoly on strategy.
Even in Silicon Valley, the senior vice-president running
the last great thing is never going to be the person who
invents the next great thing." Professor Gary Hamel
* "We are able to demonstrate a link between the way people
feel about their work and the amount customers are prepared
to spend in the stores." Paul Westgarth, Wickes
* Effective leaders have the courage to say what they are
thinking- and that usually turns out to be what everyone is
thinking." Bill Isaac
* The whole purpose of leadership is having power with
people-not lording it over them
* If your life is free of failures, you aren't taking
enough risks.
* If you are not living on the edge, you're taking up too
much space.
* "An authoritative leader states the end but gives people
plenty of leeway to devise their own means" Daniel Goleman
* "The biggest limitation we face is how fast we can
innovate. We're constrained by how fast our brains can
work" Jerry Yang, co-founder, Yahoo
* "Some people are more talented than others. Some are more
educationally privileged than others, But we all have the
capacity to be great. Greatness comes with recognising that
your potential is limited only by how you choose" Peter
Koestenbaum
* "Once you realise that your customers are just like you,
the whole dynamic of your interaction with them changes"
V.P. of Customer Satisfaction, L.L. Bean
* The most talented managers received the highest ratings
from employees on the survey question: "At work I have the
opportunity to do what I do best every day" Result from two
different UK studies
* How to restructure: Think about what someone would do if
they took you over to recover the premium paid - and do it
to yourself now.
* "People don't always have the vision, and the secret for
the person with the vision is to stand up. It takes a lot
of courage" Natalie Cole
* In the US, the average worker has had nine jobs by age
32: the average job tenure in IT is 13 months; Generation X
workers average less than 3 years in a job.
* "People don't quit because of money, People leave bad
bosses" Bev Kaye
* In the past 30 years. there have been 54,040 abstracts
containing the keyword "depression", 41,416 containing
"anxiety" and only 415 containing "joy" in the psychology
journals. Professor David Seligman
* A comment on middle management: "They are very dangerous.
They have the power to say no, but not to say yes. They are
not measured on innovation but on their ability to carry
out their responsibilities." CEO, Australian power company
* "We can see the past but not influence it. We can
influence the future but not see it." Stewart Brand - The
Clock of the Long Now
* "Management is a performing art." John Kao
* "We thought we were selling the transportation of goods;
in fact, we were selling peace of mind." Fred W. Smith,
CEO, FedEx
* "In no other area have intelligent men and women worked
harder or with greater dedication … than on improving
communications in our organisations. Yet communications has
proved as elusive as the Unicorn." Peter Drucker
* Reduce your employee turnover from up to 41 percent to 12
percent by providing training and development. Saratoga
Institute research into leaving
* After a merger, 39% of organisations fail to retain their
best talent, and 67% fail to use their talent effectively.
Right Consultants
* "Often I discover that managers only relate to those whom
they feel are doing the job well. They have no capacity to
mentor or develop the others, and instead they simply write
them off." Jack Sanger
* "How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs
of above 120 have a collective IQ of 63?" Peter Senge
* "Every experience in life, whether humble or grand,
teaches a lesson. The question is not if the lesson is
taught, but rather if it is learned." Carly Fiorina, Chief
Executive, Hewlett-Packard
* "If you think there is only one answer, then you will
only find one." Scottish Consultative Council on the
Curriculum
* "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert
Einstein
* "Nine out of ten experiments fail, and that is considered
a pretty good record by scientists." Professor Sir Harold
Kroto, Nobel prize winner
* "Whether you think you can, or whether you think you
can't. you're probably right." Henry Ford
* 'Look and you will find it. What is unsought will go
undetected." Sophocles
* "If you only understand one culture it is like seeing
with one eye only, but if you add the dimension of other
cultures, you become binocular and things can be seen in
perspective. It allows you to appreciate much more." Dame
Tamsyn Imison
* "The most important developments in civilisation have
come through the creative process, but ironically, most
people have not been taught to create." Robert Fritz
* "It is instructive to consider that the word 'health' in
English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word 'hale' meaning
'whole': that is to be healthy is to be whole. All of this
indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or
integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth
living." David Bohm
* "Change is a process of having answers questioned, rather
than having questions answered." Maureen Garrison, GTE
* Innovation has to start of the top - "What utter
rubbish." Gary Hamel
* "The secret is out - we are all leaders" Harrison Owen
* "What's it like running a large company?" "It's a bit
like being asked to walk a high wire in a three ring circus
when you've not done it before and nobody's really shown
you how ...with the safety net removed." Sol Davidson
interview with a Fortune 100 CEO reported in Organisations
& People
* "People have to understand that the leader isn't the
person at the top but the one in front." Eddie Obeng
* "Control your destiny, or someone else will." Jack Welsh
* In response to a women manager retention problem Procter
& Gamble set up a mentoring scheme which links women
managers with senior male executives - with the women
managers as the mentors to sensitise the executives in a
range of diversity issues, which also allowed the
executives to understand their customers better.
* "Let the person perform! This might also mean that you
have to take a risk and delegate some of your own work or
decision making responsibility." Anthony Landale
* No-one will ever do the job the same way as you do - they
may do it better!
* "Don't compete: do something different" Charles Handy
* "If you die without finding yourself, you've just
encumbered the world with a mass of waste product" Marsilo
Ficini (15C Italian philosopher)
* Have FUN! Fish! Philosophy
* "If you can change the mindset, particularly in top
management, hen you can change the business" Michael
Williams
* "As the new economy drives them to reconfigure all of
their resources, businesses must become 'velcro
organisations'" C K Prahalad
* "An entrepreneur who loves taking risks for their own
sake is a dead entrepreneur." Jane Royston
* "Before we rush into inventing solutions, might we please
understand and define the problem we are trying to solve?"
Roy Smith
* "When the rate of change outside is greater than the rate
of change inside, the end is in sight." Jack Welsh
* Contrary to popular belief about the attractiveness of
lateral career moves, 59% believe they will follow a
lateral path and 81% would do so for no pay increase.
Roffey Park survey
* "We knew how to build aircraft, but not how to operate
tham. We had to learn how to think like an airline." Ron
Ostrowski, Boeing
* "Even if you are hard-wired to be a leader who shares
power rather than exerts it, the command-and-control model
is hard to avoid." Rich Teerlink, Harley-Davidson
* Over 70% of workplace mistakes are directly attributable
to poor communication
* According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, both
male and female reindeer (Cervidae), grow antlers in the
summer each year. Male reindeer drop their antlers at the
beginning of winter, usually late November to mid December.
Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give
birth in the spring. Cervidae are the only members of the
deer family that have females who do this. As every
historical rendition of Santa's reindeer has depicted them
with antlers at the end of December, it follows that every
single one of them, from Rudolf to Blitzen, had to be a
female, - We should've known as they have always able to
find their way!
* "You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so
long as you (still) have something to contribute" Dag
Hammarskjöld
* "There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to
accomplish something!" Thomas Edison
* "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no
hope for it." Albert Einstein
* In times of dramatic change it is the learners
(questioners) who inherit the future. The learned find
themselves equipped top live in a world that no longer
exists. Eric Hoffer
* "Everyone is the architect of their own learning." Appius
Claudius, 4th Century BC
* "No amount of status or reward will compensate for your
inadequacy as a human being." Theodore Zeldin
* Only 38 percent of firm restructures have resulted in
improved performance. Roffey Park Institute Survey
* "What truly matters in our lives is measured through
conversation. Our dialogue with customers, employees,
peers, and our hearts is the most powerful source about
where we stand." Peter Block
* '"Think about e.commerce through 'growyourbusiness.com'
and 'destroyyourbusiness.com.'" Jack Welsh
* "We were looking for employees and people showed up"
Anita Roddick
* "Only 1 in 5 institutions has assessed the leadership
qualities needed to deliver their new (business) models;
only 1 in 10 had tried to develop them. The rest had relied
on gifted amateurs" CREATE research report
* "You can't create a leader in a classroom" Henry
Mintzberg
* "You can't trust somebody that you haven't laughed with"
Charles Handy
* "When times are hard, the last thing you should do is
panic. When you panic, your brain shuts down; you stop
listening and learning." Prof. William F. Miller
* "Ask yourself, what the hell really works here?" Lee
Iacocca
* "If there's one thing that the older generation
understands well, it's that there are things called
"cycles." And cycles teach you patience." Warren Bennis
* "It is not necessary that you hold precise, accurate
visions of your futures. It is more important that you
generate robust, powerful visions that lead to consistently
high performance and satisfaction." Marvin Weisbord
* "If you are planning for one year, plant rice.
If you are planning for ten years, plant trees.
If you are planning for one hundred years, plant people."
Chinese proverb
* "Be the change you want to see in the world" Mahatma
Gandhi
* "The edge of chaos is not the abyss. It's the sweet spot
for productive change." Richard Pascale
* "If you're going to play together as a team, you've got
to care for one another." Lee Iacocca
* "Inspirational leaders succeed not because of their ego,
but because they effectively communicate themselves - both
their virtues and their flaws - to their followers." Robert
Goffee and Gareth Jones
* "If you don't like something - change it.
If you can't change it, change your attitude.
Don't complain." Maya Angelou
* The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you
bore people they think it's their fault" Henry Kissinger
* "We know, empirically as well as anecdotally, that
retaining and strategically managing our human capital
drives economic value for our company." J W Marriott Jr.
* "It is only slightly facetious to say that digital
information lasts forever-or five years, whichever comes
first." RAND researcher Jeff Rothenberg
* "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness
that created them." Albert Einstein
* "Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very
heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that
he or she makes a difference to the success of the
organisation. When that happens people feel centred and
that gives their work meaning." Warren G. Bennis
* "The best managers start with a radical assumption: Each
person's greatest room for growth is in the area of his
greatest strength." Marcus Buckingham
* Business that invest an extra £50 per week in training
grow profits nearly twice as fast as those that don't.
Learning and Skills Council
* "A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that
getting results is all there is to the job. Great leaders
find a balance between getting results and how they get
them." Andy Pearson
* A leader is someone who commits to what hasn't happened
yet. Roger Nierenberg
* "Who says productive also means busy? We need to create a
climate that's safe for change, and that means not
criticising people if they aren't 100% efficient every
minute of the day." Tom DeMarco
* Most strategic alliances and partnerships fail because
the companies neglect the relationship issues. Partners'
excitement at capitalising on synergies often masks
simmering conflicts around skills and values differences
which then emerge after the deal is done. Research by
Vantage Partners, May 2001
* "When you're faced with a decision, always choose the
bolder option. The most extraordinary things are created by
ordinary people." Simon Walker
* "In the past, the leader was the guy with the answers.
Today, no leader can have all the answers. The leader may
have a vision, but the actual solutions have to be made by
the people closest to the action - the people at the coal
face." Steve Miller, CEO, Shell Oil
* "It didn't matter what your job was, everyone wanted the
same things." Truck driver at Roadway Express commenting on
a cross company strategy discussion.
* "Stop looking to the outside for help. The solutions to
your problems exist inside your company." Marcus Buckingham
* "Diversity is not about helping 'them' to join 'us', but
about critically looking at 'us' and rooting out all
aspects of our culture that inappropriately exclude people
and stop us being inclusive." Robin Schneider
* "If everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody" W S
Gilbert
* "Encouraging managers to engage in behaviour such as risk
taking may be counterproductive in cultures that punish
managers for making mistakes." John Burgoyne and Kim James,
Cranfield
* The physicist, Niels Bohr, had a horseshoe hanging over
his front door, and an acquaintance said to him, "I was
surprised that a great physicist like yourself believes in
horseshoes." Bohr replied, "As I understand it, you don't
have to believe in them in order for them to bring you
luck."
* Make their day Fish!! philosophy
* "It takes courage to hold visions that are not in the
social main-stream. But it is exactly that courage to stand
for one's vision that distinguishes people of high levels
of personal mastery" Peter Senge
* "Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of
fear and no concept of the odds against them." Dr. Robert
Jarvik
* "People cannot be managed. Inventories can be managed,
but people must be led." H Ross Perot
* "In most hierarchies even high employees do not lead
anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction
and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey
regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. They lead
only as the carved wooden figurehead leads the ship." Dr
Lawrence J Peter
* "In a humble state, you learn better. I can't find
anything else very exciting about humility, but at least
there's that." John Dooner
* 9 out of 10 successful sexual harassment cases in the UK
end with the claimant losing their job or resigning. Equal
Opportunities Commission
* "Authentic leaders have absorbed the fundamental fact of
existence - that you can't get around life's inherent
contradictions. The leadership mind is spacious. It has
ample room for the ambiguities of the world, for
conflicting feelings, and for contradictory ideas. I
believe that the central leadership attribute is the
ability to manage polarity." Peter Koestenbaum
* "The place we need really imaginative new ideas is in
conflict theory. The real weakness ... is the lack of
conflict resolution methods other than litigation and
guns." Alvin Toffler
* "Almost all businessmen think their employees are
involved in the firm and are its greatest asset. Almost all
employees think they are given too little attention and
respect, and cannot say what they really think." Ricardo
Semler
* "Failing organisations are usually over-managed and
under-led." Warren Bennis
* "For many years before its break-up, Rover had championed
learning at all levels in the organisation. But what it
learnt did little to enhance its competitiveness." Colin
Coulson-Thomas
* 15 per cent of all new businesses in the UK are started
by over-50s. 35 per cent of 'third-agers' start their own
businesses following redundancy. Barclays Bank survey
* "Creativity is not just about major project or service
breakthroughs. The first person to invent the wheel was a
lucky fool, the person who added the other three was a
genius." Professor Amin Rajan
* "We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were
beginning to form into teams, we were reorganised. I was to
learn later that we tend to meet any new situation by
reorganising- creating the illusion of progress whilst
producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation."
Caius Petronius, 66AD
* "A mission statement is mother-hood and apple pie
composed by about fifty people (cooks all of them). A
vision statement is an impossible dream of the chief
executive." John Harvey Jones
* "Don't worry about stockholders or employees. If you take
care of your customers, everything else will fall into
place." Lee Iacocca
* "He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has
mastered himself is mightier still." Lao-Tzu
* "If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look
at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals." J K
Rowling
* "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone
discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is
there, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by
something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is
another theory which states that this has already
happened." Douglas Adams
* "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the
world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." Margaret
Mead
* "We live in a moment of history where change is so
speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is
disappearing." R D Laing
* "Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to
what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind
lets you. What you believe, you can achieve." Mary Kay Ash
* "In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the
system; in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the
worker." Peter Drucker
* "They're not employees, they're people." Peter Drucker
* "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they
are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do
not refer to reality." Albert Einstein
* "If you have people learning, no matter what it is, it
has a good impact on the business." Steve Hill, CEO Defence
Aviation Repair Agency
* "For most of us, there's a tension between
dissatisfaction and fear. On the one hand, we're not at
peace, not happy with what we see in ourselves or in our
lives. On the other hand, we're afraid to make a move, to
leave behind what we have been." Shoshana Zuboff
* "Love is the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing
your knowledge, networks, and compassion with your business
partners." Tim Sanders
* "The one who tells the stories rules the world." Hopi
proverb
* "The purpose of life is not to win. The purpose of life
is to grow and to share. And when you come to look back on
all that you have done in life, you will get more
satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought to other
people's lives than you will from times that you outdid and
you defeated them." Harold Kushner
* "I've yet to find the man, however exalted his station,
who did not do better work and put forth greater effort
under a spirit of approval than under the spirit of
criticism." Charles Schwab
* "When faced with any business decision, any call on your
time or resources, you need to ask, What will this do to
help bring the customer back?" Feargal Quinn
* "Quit looking for the next big thing. Put the technology
that's sitting on the shelves to work." Bob Davis, founder
of Lycos
* "Why use an umbrella when the shoes are leaking?"
Japanese Prover
* "There are risks and costs to a programme of action but
they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of
comfortable inaction" John F Kennedy
* "We don't like to follow others. We like to go in a
different direction." Hiroyuki Yoshino, CEO Honda
* Every wall is a door. Ralph Waldo Emerson
* "You need to encourage innovation when your company's
doing well. The last thing you want to do when you're in
the lead is become complacent." Michael Dell
* "Smart companies recognise that great products and
services can deliver more than profits; they deliver
experiences that make life better in some small way." Scott
Bedbury
* "You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow
you, unless you know how to follow, too." Sam Rayburn
* "The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Out
thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later,
with astounding accuracy." Florence Shinn
* "Humility is the key to leadership." Rudolph Guiliani
* "It's not the strongest that survives, nor the most
intelligent. It's the one most adaptable to change." Phil
Condit, Boeing
* "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts
and still be entirely uneducated." Alec Bourne
* "Education is what survives when what has been learned
has been forgotten." B F Skinner
* "Education is the best provision for old age." Aristotle
* "One thing is clear to me: We, as human beings, must be
willing to accept people who are different from ourselves."
Barbara Jordan
* "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not
mandatory." W. Edwards Deming
* A recent Business Week cover highlighted "The Good CEO" —
has finding an upright chief executive now become front
page news?
* "Planning without action is futile. Action without
planning is fatal." Anon
* "It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that
is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible
decision can be made any longer without taking into account
not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be."
Isaac Asimov
* In the last year, the number of disciplinary cases for
internet and e-mail abuse outstripped those for dishonesty,
violence and health and safety breaches put together.
* There is no "I" in team.
* "Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second
when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied." Pearl S.
Buck
* "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an
irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in
people's minds." Samuel Adams
* "You don't stop playing because you grow old — you grow
old because you stop playing" Anon
* "You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot
farther with a smile and a gun." Al Capone
* "If you believe you can. And if you believe you can't.
You're right!" Henry Ford
* "It's the things that pushed you the most, that helped
you the most." Jim Loeh
* Japanese firm Shiseido are offering staff on maternity
leave access to their e-Learning portal. Where staff can
access business and non-business related courses as well as
keeping up to date.
* "If there's one thing I didn't expect, having grown up in
a rural part of the US among pretty humble and basic
people, I would never have thought that integrity would be
regarded as an option in so many places." Gary Hamel
* "Quality services and products must be supported by
quality people—the same effort and professionalism that
companies invest in creating quality products and services
must be invested in developing quality people." Peter
Koestenbaum
* "The problems we have created cannot be solved with the
same level of thinking on which they were created." Albert
Einstein
* "87 percent of newly learned skills can be lost when
there is no follow-up coaching after the training." Neil
Rackham
* "One of the hardest things about innovation is getting
people to accept that the way they work just might not be
the best." Thomas Fogarty
* "The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if
you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin
* The man who moved a mountain is the one who started
taking away the small stones." Chinese proverb
* "People do not lack strength, they lack will." Victor
Hugo
* "'Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said
the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me
whatsoever.'" Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy
* "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human
stupidity — and I am not sure about the former." Albert
Einstein
* "When you run out of red, use blue!" Pablo Picasso
* "If you can't be a good example, you'll have to be a
terrible warning." Catherine Aird
* “Problems with time cannot be resolved at the level at
which they are experienced, for they are experienced at the
level of being in time, and they can be solved only at the
deeper and more real level of being time itself. That level
means being totally true to oneself.” Peter Koestenbaum
* “I don't try to dance better than anyone else. I only try
to dance better than myself” Michael Baryshnikov
* "The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do
good work today" Elbert Hubbard
* "The measure of success is not whether you have a tough
problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem
you had last year." John Foster Dulles
* "Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward
dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever
momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being
told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the
fact that the information will help them make better
decisions." Warren Bennis
* "Creative leaders find ways of stepping into the shoes of
other people and asking, 'How would I feel and what would I
want if I were this person?'" Gay Hendricks and Kate
Ludeman
* "If you want to figure out your path in life, you can't
have an end date on the exploration." John Wood
* “First, before you can become a leader you have to
understand yourself,” Master Nan.
* “Learning is suddenly understanding something you've
understood all your life — but in a new way.” Doris Lessing
* “Everyone is the architect of their own learning.” Appius
Claudius
* "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty,
and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so
we must think anew and act anew." Abraham Lincoln
* "It is only when we truly know and understand that we
have a limited time on earth, and that we have no way of
knowing when our time is up, that we will begin to live
each day to the fullest; as if it was the only one we had."
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
* “Perseverance and resolve are 90 percent of the battle if
you want to accomplish anything of worth.” Larry Zimmerman,
CFO, Xerox
* “You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."
Jon Kabat-Zinn
* “Brainpower does not need a passport.” Richard Tattershaw
* "Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in
looking outward together in the same direction." Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
* "It's not the medium that's the message. Your methodology
is the message. Silence can be a quality of presence."
Ralph Ardill, Imagination
* “There are only two kinds of people who are really
fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and
people who know absolutely nothing” Oscar Wilde
* “Peer pressure substitutes for bureaucracy. It enlists
loyalty in ways that bureaucracy doesn't.” John Mackey,
Whole Foods Market
* “The biggest and best transforming ventures have been
simple ideas with simple strategies.” John Doer
* "In organisations, real power and energy is generated
through relationships. The patterns of relationships and
the capacities to form them are more important than tasks,
functions, roles, and positions." Margaret Wheatley
* "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The
question is: What are we busy about?" Henry David Thoreau
* "A well-led organisation consists of nothing but
leaders." Peter Koesenbaum
* "Our greatest challenges today will be surmounted by
choices made, not from what we know, but from what we
don't." Arupa Tesolin
* "Luck is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity
meet." Richard Nelson Bolles
* "I would not advise anyone to stay in the pool of mud"
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
* "To manage change and make it more acceptable, you have
to build an atmosphere of trust and self-confidence" Stuart
R. Levine
* Imagine the best day of your life. Now imagine living
that way, 365 days per year.
* "Learn to bend. It's better than breaking." Leo Buscaglia
* "The more clearly you can articulate your organisation's
theories about what leads to success, the more deliberate
you can be about investing in the elements that are
critical to that success. From a systems thinking
perspective, having a core theory of success means moving
beyond identifying individual success factors to seeing the
linkages that create the reinforcing engines of success
within the organisation." Daniel H. Kim
* "Employees who are engaged are more productive, more
profitable, work more safely, and stay longer. Engaged
employees emotionally engage their customers. Those
disengaged may be physically present, but are
psychologically disruptive, unhappy, and insist on sharing
their unhappiness with others". Gallup
* "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Will
Rogers
* "Many thoughts go around quite inadequately clad, almost
risking prosecution for indecent exposure" Reg Revans
* "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old
because we stop playing." George Bernard Shaw
* "Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn
and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like
climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views,
discovering unexpected connections between our starting
point and its rich environment. But the point from which we
started out still exists and can be seen, although it
appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view
gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous
way up." Albert Einstein
* "Our worst foes are not belligerent circumstances, but
wavering spirits." Helen Keller
* "The things that make good headlines attract our
attention because they are on the surface of the stream of
life, and they distract our attention from the slower,
impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the
surface and penetrate to the depths. But of course it is
really these deeper, slower movements that, in the end,
make history, and it is they that stand out huge in
retrospect, when the sensational passing events have
dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions."
Arnold Toynbee
* "Life is not the way it's supposed to be. It's the way it
is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference."
Virginia Satir
* "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure
is trying to please everyone" Bill Cosby
* "Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be
answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced." Alan Watts
* "If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back now
and then to make sure it's still there." Will Rogers
* "It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still
differentiate between a time for learning and a time for
play without seeing the vital connection between them." Leo
Buscaglia
* "Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is
indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps."
David Lloyd George
* "Work as if you living in the early days of a better
nation" Alasdair Gray
* "None of us has gotten where we are solely by pulling
ourselves up from our own bootstraps. We got here because
somebody bent down and helped us." Thurgood Marshall
* "A leader takes people where they want to go. A great
leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go
but ought to be." Rosalynn Carter
* Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be
at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the
huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the
wrod as a wlohe.
* "If you're not willing to accept the pain real values
incur, don't bother going to the trouble of formulating a
values statement." Patrick Lencioni
* "Even while they teach, men learn." Seneca
* "Some students drink deeply at the fountain of knowledge
- others only gargle." Anonymous
* "A child of five could understand this... Send someone to
fetch a child of five." Groucho Marx
* "Absolute frankness is too much to hope for (and probably
too much to bear)." Fernando Bartolomé
* "Institutions falter when they invest too much in 'what
is' and too little in 'what could be'." Gary Hamel
* "If there is anything that undermines trust, it is the
feeling that people at the top lack integrity." Warren
Bennis
* "In their search for the soloist, many companies forget
the orchestra." Richard Reeves
* "Order emerges from chaos when there is a sense of shared
purpose." Lynda Gratton
* The clever man will tell you what he knows; he may even
try to explain it to you. The wise man encourages you to
discover it for yourself, even although he knows it inside
out. But since he seems to give you nothing, we have no
need to reward him. Thus the wise have disappeared and we
are left in a desolation of the clever." Reg Revans
* "There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are
blessings given to us to learn from." Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
* “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve
the co operation of many minds. I may be given credit for
having blazed the trail but when I look at the subsequent
developments, I feel the credit is due to others rather
than to myself.” Alexander Graham Bell
* “People have to feel needed. Frequently, we just offer a
job and 'perks.' We don't always offer people a purpose.
When people feel there is a purpose and that they're
needed, there's not much else to do except let them do the
work.” Maya Angelou
* Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe
* “Climbing is not about conquering the rock; it is about
conquering yourself.” Jim Collins
* “Peoples minds are like parachutes - they only function
when they are open!” Leanne Hastie
* “I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like
being taught.” Winston Churchill
* “Learning is suddenly understanding something you've
understood all your life – but in a new way.” Dorris
Lessing
* “Your senior team is, for better or for worse, he
organisation's model of what a high performing team is.”
Howard Guttman
* “Projects are the power of human invention harnessed to
circumvent our tragically limited ability to predict the
future.” Laurent Bossavit
* “A member of the staff thought she was doing very well
during her probationary period because the reports on her
work came back from the Quality Assurance Department marked
NOTFAIL. It wasn't until her three month performance review
that she learned that NOTFAIL is short for `notification of
failure.'” A Dilbert Induhvidual tale
* “Never do today that which will become someone else's
responsibility tomorrow.” David Brent (The Office)
* “Do not announce a deadline until you know it can be done
by then.” Sir Andrew Turnbull, The Cabinet Office
* “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the
only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” Aldous
Huxley
*
* “The greatest danger is to fall in love with your first
really significant idea and then spend your career
defending it.” Margaret Mead
* "PowerPoint doesn't communicate – you do.” Guy Browning
* The criteria applied by clients when selecting
consultants: Relationship – Trust – Cost – Quality. Gartner
Research 2003
* “I used to think that running an organisation was
equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't
think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more
improvisation.” Warren Bennis
* "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is
not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it;
and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
Marcus Aurelius
* “That the birds of worry and care fly over your head,
this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your
hair, this you can prevent.” Chinese Proverb
* “If you think you're too small to have an impact, try
going to sleep with a mosquito.” Anita Roddick
* “Leadership is the ability to align strengths toward a
goal or vision in such a way that weaknesses are
irrelevant.” Peter Drucker
* “Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing:
the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude
in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own
way.” Victor Frankl
* “Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our
ability to learn faster than the competition.” Arie de Geus
* “There are so many issues it's like taking out a
subscription.” Overheard at the 2004 Consultant's Forum
* “The majority of people perform well in a crisis; it's on
the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking,
that the spirit falters.” Alan Bennett
* “Jazz is the sound of people negotiating change. It's an
international language for fusing design, manufacturing,
and implementation into one multifaceted process. The tools
jazz musicians use embody a tradition based on the
principles of alignment, self-initiative, experimentation,
and cross-functional understanding – principles that have
become imperatives for business in the 21st century.”
Michael Gold
* “In today's new economy... the minds of gifted people are
what truly distinguish one organisation from another,” John
Kao
* “In order to live happily and free, you may have to
sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.”
Richard Bach
* `Poor communication' is a euphemism for `I don't like
what you are saying'.
* “It's not the hours you put into your work that count –
it's the work you put into the hours.” Sam Ewing
* “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
* “You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel
when you come in contact with a new idea” Pearl S. Buck
* “Let me drop everything and work on your problem.” Seen
on a T-short worn by Chainsaw, a groupie to Melissa
Etheridge
* “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states
we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish
to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of
death.” Anaiis Nin
* “When we change the way we look at things, the things we
look at change.” Wayne Dyer
* “There is no electronic substitute for the occasional
exchange of pheromones.” Ursula Hows
* “Home working is about the work produced not `what are
they up to'” Tim Dwelley & Yvonne Bennion
* “Do or do not. There is no `try'” Yoda in Star Wars.
* “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but
often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see
the one which has opened for us.” Helen Keller
* “Management is to do with planning and organising
something. Leadership is to do with creating that thing in
the first place” John Kotter
* “To be effective, organisations need people with a
healthy disrespect for the boss.” Manfred Kets de Vries
* “How can you get the best out of your employees? Expect
the best.” J Sterling Livingston
* “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of
a dog, it's too dark to read.” Groucho Marx
* “You can tell them to go to hell but they just won't go”
Lyndon B Johnson
* “People are very open-minded about new things...as long
as they're exactly like the old ones!” Charles Kettering
* “Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever
looks at it when it has been in the house three days?”
George Bernard Shaw
* “One day, out of nowhere, you realise you don't know who
you are, and none of the cards in your wallet provide the
slightest clue to your real identity.” Sam Keen
* “The autopsy revealed that his coronary arteries were
clean. The heart attack had been caused by a spasm of the
coronary vessels, directly induced by hostility,
resentment, impatience, fear and exaggerated feelings of
being indispensable.” Deepak Chopra MD
* “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves” Rainer Maria Rilke
* “Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we
ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. The question
is the helmsman of consciousness. The questions we ask
determine whether we will be superficial or profound,
acceptors of the status quo or searchers. The difference
between Einstein and Hitler depends on the questions they
asked. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends
on what you search for.” Sam Keen
* “A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a
vision is drudgery. A task with a vision is the hope of the
world.” Inscription on a church in Sussex, England circa
1730
* “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then
they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will,
they soon become inevitable.” Christopher Reeve
* “Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture.
It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the
stairs.” Vaclav Havel
* “Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for
formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think
multi-dimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes
of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and
conseq-uences that are inherent in each experience – to
appreciate the fact that life is complex.” M Scott Peck
* “I am living so far beyond my income that we may almost
be said to be living apart.” e e cummings
* “In each of us are places where we have never gone. Only
by pressing the limits do you ever find them.” Dr. Joyce
Brothers
* “The Power and Magic of Lean is to discover those hidden
treasures in your company: to find and eliminate all of the
non-value-adding wastes and to bring out the infinite
creative capacity from every single worker.” Norman Bodek
* “People are very open-minded about new things...as long
as they're exactly like the old ones!” Charles Kettering
* From an author unwilling to provide a name:
Which way did they go?
How many of them were there?
How fast were they going?
I must find them!
I am their leader.
* “We are not what we know but what we are willing to
learn”. Mary Catherine Bateson
* “People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.” W
Somerset Maugham
* “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that
the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live
by them” John Fitzgerald Kennedy
* “I am done with great things and big plans, great
institutions and big success. I am for those tiny,
invisible loving human forces that work from individual to
individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like
so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water,
which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of
pride.” William James
* “Our background and circumst-ances may have influenced
who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.”
Barbara Geraci
* “Managers ask the same questions everyone else asks.
Don't start with the question, `What do I want to do?' but
with the question, `What needs to be done?'” Peter Drucker
* “If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for
anything.” New Internationalist advertisement
* “Vision is the capacity to believe in what my heart sees,
what others can't see. Vision is seeing positive
possibilities where others see only negative
probabilities.” Carl A. Hammerschlag
* “Even if it is a little thing, do something for those who
have need of help, something for which you get no pay but
the privilege of doing it.” Dr. Albert Schweitzer
* “Many acts of service cost nothing and take little time:
listening, encouragement, compliments, grat-itude, and
compassion. Anytime you affirm the worth of others, you
serve.” Chris Karcher
* “The task of leadership is to align strengths in ways
that make weak-nesses irrelevant.” Peter Drucker
* “There is no power for change greater than a community
discovering what it cares about.” Meg Wheatley
* “One learns in order to do better what one already knows
how to do well.” Zen saying
* “In times of rapid change, experience may be your worst
enemy.” J. Paul Getty
* “A leader is anyone who wants to make a difference at
these times.” Meg Wheatley
* “The Chinese have a concept for that roughly translates
to “heart and mind for wanting to learn.” So whereas
students in Western cultures may experience shame or guilt
as the result of failing to achieve, the Chinese model of
learning suggests that shame or guilt results from failing
to want to learn.” Jin Li
* “The creativity and positive energy you put forth come
back to you many times over. So do the hurt and
destruction. Which would you rather get back?” Ralph
Marston
* “In this world it is not what we take up, but what we
give up, that makes us rich.” Henry Ward Beecher
* "You are what you think about all day long." Dr. Robert
Schuller
* “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”
Mark Twain
* "Over the years, leaders consistently have chosen power
rather than productivity. They would rather be in control
than have the organization work at optimal efficiency. And
now there's another belief surfacing: When risk runs high,
power must be wielded by only a few people. Just the
opposite is true. Reflective leaders, including those in
the military, have learned that the higher the risk, the
more we need everyone's commitment and intelligence."
Margaret Wheatley
* “Most great men and women are not perfectly rounded in
their personalities, but are instead people whose one
driving enthusiasm is so great it makes their faults seem
insignificant.” Charles A. Cerami
* “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize
how close they were to success when they gave up.” Thomas
Alva Edison
* “The world is full of willing people; some willing to
work, the rest willing to let them.” Robert Frost
* “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The
only completely consistent people are the dead.” Aldous
Huxley
* “Whenever two people meet there are really six people
present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as
the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
William James
* “The only difference between a problem and a solution is
that people understand the solution.” Charles F. Kettering
* “Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by
people not smart enough to know they were impossible.” Doug
Larson
* “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books
of quotations.” Sir Winston Churchill
* "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* "We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long
enough." Helen Keller
* "A conclusion is the place where you got tired of
thinking.” Steven Wright
* “It's hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness
of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the
world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were
merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise
in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world
and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan
the day.” E. B. White
* “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting
peace.” Amelia Earhart
* “When I meet another being and truly desire that he
exist, it is necessary that I withdraw, so to speak, from
the space that I occupy and leave a space for him to occupy
in the way that he wishes. For instance, when he tells me
his emotion or his suffering, I need to strive to empty
myself of my own emotion or suffering, to welcome his as he
expresses them through his word. If I am unable to do so, I
reduce his experience to my experience, his desires to my
desires, his meanings to mine. I occupy all the space of
these forms of existence and leave him no space to
translate his originality and unique character. A
relationship that is not based on this withdrawal is
founded on violence and negation of the personality and
liberty of the other.” Armand Abécassis
* “Vision is the capacity to believe in what the heart
sees, what others can't see. Vision is seeing positive
possibilities where others see only negative
probabilities.” Carl A. Hammerschlag
* “A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is
an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something
more.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter
* “The very essence of change demands coming into contact
with the unknown.” Frederick Matthias Alexander
* “The beginning is half of everything” Greek saying
* Hogg Robinson plc have joined the group who are banning
email. Email free Fridays encourage staff to pick up the
phone or walk across the office to talk to one another.
David Radcliffe CEO
* “Customers are a business's scariest resource.” Don
Peppers
* “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the
only one you have “ Emile Chartier
* “For the beginner there are many possibilities. For the
expert there are none.” Buddhist saying
* “I have no particular talent; I am merely extremely
inquisitive.” Albert Einstein
* “We should think of learning as the expansion of one's
capacity – to create, to produce results.” Peter Senge
* “The continual stream of great products and services from
highly visionary companies stems from them being
outstanding organisations, not the other way around.” James
Collins & Jim Porras
* An American study found that most doctors sued for
malpractice didn't give their patents any lower quality
medical information, but on average spent three minutes
less with them and spoke in a domineering tone.
* “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its
best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to
fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,
and never stop fighting.” e e cummings
* “To fly, we have to have resistance” Maya Lin
* “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing
oneself.” Baudelaire
* “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to
drop back” Chinese proverb
* “If you want someone to build a ship, do not send them
out to gather the wood, saw it up, nail it together to make
a boat. Rather, teach them to have a desire for the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exubéry
* “Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes
you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which
comes the inner voice which says, `This is the real me',
and when you have found that attitude, follow it.” William
James
* “To be ethical is profitable, but to be ethical because
it is profitable is not ethical.” Peter Koestenbaum
* “Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse
keeps moving but does not make any progress.” Alfred A.
Montapert
* “Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is
about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can
unleash.” Harriet Rubin
* “It is better to light one small candle than to curse the
darkness.” Chinese proverb
* "When asked to name just one big merger that had lived up
to expectations, Leon Cooperman, former co-chairman of
Goldman Sachs' Investment Policy Committee, answered: “I'm
sure there are success stories out there, but at this
moment I draw a blank.”' Mark Sirower, The Synergy Trap
* “The quieter you become, the more you can hear” Ram Das
* “Whatever actions a leader performs, common man will
follow! Whatever standards he sets by his exemplary acts,
all the world pursues! Bhagavat gita
* “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn
more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” John
Quincy Adams
* “We can only see when a crisis opens our eyes. We cannot
