Snippets
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 see what is emotionally difficult to see. We can only see what is relevant to our view of the future.” Arie de Geus
* “Physiologically, it simply doesn't matter whether your anger is justified or not. The body doesn't make moral judgements about feelings; it just responds." Doc Childre and Howard Martin
* “It is particularly worrying that long-serving employees - who know most about their organisations - trust management the least.” Dr. Patrick Gilbert
* “Not everything that can be counted counts, not everything that counts can be counted.” Einstein
* “Theory is forever grey, but the tree of life is green.” Goethe
* “In the thousands of moments that we string together to make up our lives, there are some where time seems to change its shape and a certain light falls across our ordinary path. If we stop searching for purpose, we become it. Looking back, we might describe these moments as times when we were at our best, when the gifts we were born with and the talents we have developed were braided with what we love and the needs of the world.” Dawna Markov
* “Remember, you cannot leap over a precipice in two easy smaller jumps. While in the air, you are gripped by the panic, the anxiety, that are the inevitable companions of true growth” Peter Koestenbaum
* “The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more” Erica Jong
* “It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others” Andrew J. Holmes
• "The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it.” Andrew Carnegie
• “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen” Ernest Hemingway
• "The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.” Richard Bach
• “Without great employees you can never have great customer service.” Richard F. Greson
• “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” Naguib Mahfouz
• “First put yourself at peace and then you may the better make others be at peace.” Thomas a Kempis
• “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.” Robert Louis Stevenson
• “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it, it is what the client or customer gets out of it.” Peter Drucker
• “Good stories have wings and, like birds, they fly from mountaintop to mountaintop.” Romanian proverb
• “To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.” Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• “Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble” Frank Tyger
• “The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.” John Schaar
• “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
• “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
• “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
• “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes.” Carl Jung
• “Praise, flattery, exaggerated manners and fine, high-sounding words were not part of Lakota politeness. Excessive manners were put down as insincere, and the constant talker was considered rude and thoughtless. Conversation was never begun at once, not in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, ‘thought comes before speech.’” Chief Luther Standing Bear
• “There are no such thing as bad soldiers, only bad leaders.” General Omar Bradley
• “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.” Ayn Rand
• “He who asks questions, cannot avoid the answers” African proverb
• “The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the courage and impetus to do good.” Pope Benedict XVI
• “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” John Muir
• " I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” Louisa May Alcott
• “The genius of communication is the ability to be both totally honest and totally kind at the same time.” .John Powell
• “All serious daring starts from within.” Eudora Welty
• “Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.” Dennis Wholey
• “Real change isn't motivated by either crisis or fear. The best inspiration comes from leaders who can create compelling and positive visions of the future.” Alan Deutschman
• “Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it” Henry Miller
• “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
• “Good stories have wings and, like birds, they fly from mountaintop to mountaintop.” Romanian proverb
• 95% of assets drive out of the front gate every evening. The leaders job is to bring them back next morning.
• “The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.” Alice Wellington Rollins
• “The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it.” Andrew Carnegie
• “In the thousands of moments that we string together to make up our lives, there are some where time seems to change its shape and a certain light falls across our ordinary path. If we stop searching for purpose, we become it. Looking back, we might describe these moments as times when we were at our best, when the gifts we were born with and the talents we have developed were braided with what we love and the needs of the world.” Dawna Markova
• “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen” Ernest Hemingway
• “The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.” Richard Bach
• “Without great employees you can never have great customer service.” Richard F. Greson
• “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” Naguib Mahfouz
• “First put yourself at peace and then you may the better make others be at peace.” Thomas a Kempis
• “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.” Robert Louis Stevenson
• “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it, it is what the client or customer gets out of it.” Peter Drucker
• “Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this inter-dependence produces the highest form of living.” Anais Nin
• “Don't be blinded to the good things obscured by the trouble spots. They could be the way to the future.” Automotive Design and Production
• “There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.” Albert Guinon
• “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” Calvin Coolidge
• “The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.” Joan Borysenko
• “The power to question is the basis of all human progress.” Indira Gandhi
• “Every subconsciously deliberate mystake is a successful discourse” Jacques Lacan
• “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
• “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
• “”He pretends to be better at what he does than he is. I prefer people who are better at what they do than what they think they are” William Gibson
• “Thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.” David Bohm
• “We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.” George Santayana
• “In organizations, 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 difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
• “There are eternal laws that cannot be erased , even if they are not written” Antigone, Sophocles
• “Each of us speaks, moves, thinks and feels in a different way, each according to the image of ourselves that we have built up over the years. In order to change our mode of action, we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us.” Dr Moshe Feldenkrais
• “Experience is a flame that lightens only those whom it has burnt” French saying
• “People’s minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open” Leanne Hastie
• “Questioning is the door of knowledge” Irish saying
• “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers” James Thurber
• Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words; / Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions; / Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits; / Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character; / Be careful of your character; for your character becomes your destiny. Author unknown
• “In every out thrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth.” Rachel Carson
• “Much of what keeps us alive or kills us remains a medical mystery. People who by all medical predictions should die young often don't, and those who it seems should not too often do. The answer to this paradox may rest in learning less about why we get sick and die and more about why we don't become ill and why we thrive.” Dr. Paul Pearsall
• “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.“ Albert Einstein
• “Openly questioning the way the world works and challenging the power of the powerful is not an activity customarily rewarded.” Dale Spender
• “It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.” Goethe
• “You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.” Henry Ford
• “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.” Wayne Gretzky
• “It is not every question that deserves an answer.” Publilius Syrus
• “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Albert Einstein
• “We have no choice but to think together, to ponder, to gather in groups and communities. The question is how to do this, how to come together and think and hear each other in order to touch and be touched by the intelligence we need.” Jacob Needleman
• “A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.” Miguel de Cervantes
Some famous miss-readings of the future:
• ““64K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates 1981
• “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Harry Warner, Warner Bros 1927
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, Digital Equipment 1977
• " Everything that can be invented has been invented.” US Patent Office 1899
• “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.” Decca Records rejecting the Beatles 1962
• “There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Charles Rennie Mackintosh
• “Have you tried using a giant Toblerone as a toast rack? Works once!” Linda Smith
• “Even while they teach, men learn.” Seneca
• “Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.” Henry David Thoreau
• “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Ellen Parr
• “Unless you figure out what success means to you personally and to your organization, leadership is an almost pointless conversation.” Peter Drucker
• “To follow, without halt, one aim: That's the secret of success.” Anna Pavlova
• “Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.” Liz Smith
• “The same work under the same conditions will be estimated differently by ten different estimators or by one estimator at ten different times.” Project Management Saying
• “Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.” Carol Lloyd
• “Success has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.” Danny Thomas
• “The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it -- every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.” John D. Rockefeller III
• “The good life seems to be a life lived out of our values, consistent with our talents and reflecting our aspirations. Success is about integrity, commitment, and service. Often, money and other nice things arrive, too, but success is seldom found in anything as obvious as a bank account or fancy house.” Dr Phil Humbert
• “Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.” Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Did you know that participants in the opening and closing ceremonies at the Turin Winter Olympics practiced their routines 11,000 times?
• “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.” Carol Dweck
• “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe
• “He who aspires to govern the state, needs to learn to govern himself.” Socrates
• “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Charles Mackay
• “He who avoids his shadow, meets his destiny.” Carl Jung
• “We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” Carlos Castaneda
• “The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.” Arnold Palmer
• “The value of a thing lies in the cost of attaining it.” David DeFord
• “Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “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
• “Success flourishes best in the rich soil of a well-managed life. Wise leaders have always known that a key requirement for all success is keeping life simple, well-run and orderly. There is no secret about that!” Dr. Philip Humbert
• “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
• “The great end of learning is not knowledge but action.” Peter Honey
• “You cannot teach people anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves.” Galileo
• “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions” Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” Martin Vanbee
• In the European Union one half of the available workforce is outside of organisations, not in full-time jobs.
• “52% of all projects finish at 189% of their initial budget, and some after huge investment of time and money are simply never completed” The Standish Group
• “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Steven Wright
• “Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you, you must acquire it.” Sudie Back
• “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Confucius
• “There are really only three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who say, ‘What happened?’” Ann Landers
• “Well done is better than well said.” Benjamin Franklin
• “When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.” Hugh White
• “Conflict is everywhere: water hitting rock, teachers pushing students to learn, or wolves trying to coexist with ranchers. It is our call to evolve. It challenges us to look beyond our current views to an expanded reality. It is a relentless teacher that asks us to see unity where before we found opposites.” Deidre Comb
• God grant me the courage to change the things I can change; the serenity to accept those things I cannot change; and the wisdom to know the difference.
• “A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the schoolhouse walls, which moulds and develops us.” James Baldwin
• “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it” Maya Angelou
• “When you are through changing, you are through.” Bruce Barton
• “I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.” George Carlin
• “Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given.” Deepak Chopra
• “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi
• “It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.” Yogi Berra
• “Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.” James Dean
• “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain
• “Life is a great canvas - throw all the paint on it you can.” Danny Kaye
• “In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
• “Knowing yourself, being yourself and disclosing yourself are vital ingredients of effective leadership” Rob Goffee
• “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” Marilyn vos Savant
• “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” Epictetus
• “Nothing is more confusing than people who give good advice and set bad examples.” Norman Vincent Peale
• “Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.” Thomas Carlyle
• “If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.” Mary Engelbreit
And worryingly…
• “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.” Bill Clinton
• “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” Wayne Gretzky
• “If you're going to have a fantasy, why not go first class?” Marvin Weisbord
• “The best way to predict the future is to create it!” Peter Drucker
• “There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.” Warren Bennis
• “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony” Mohandas Gandhi
• “The person saying that it can't be done should not interrupt the person doing it." Chinese proverb
• "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Muriel Rukeyser
• "A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something." Wilson Mizner
• “The secret of success is consistency of purpose” Benjamin Disraeli
• “You tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” Homer Simpson
• "There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn't tell you about it?" Kin Hubbard
• “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough.” Charles Handy
• “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” Anatole France
• “There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.” Washington Irving
• “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” Michelangelo
• “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “The question is not what a man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, value and appreciate.” John Ruskin
• "Acceptance is such an important commodity, some have called it "the first law of personal growth." Peter McWilliams
• “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better.” Mother Teresa
• “The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.” William James
• “Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don't keep it a secret.” Mary Kay Ash
• “If you love something, you'll bring so much of yourself to it that it will create your future.” Francis Ford Coppola
• “My grandfather told me that there are two kinds of people; those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try and be in the first group; there was less competition there.” Indira Ghandi
• “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work” Peter Drucker
• “Listen to the people who actually do the work” Jack Welch
• “If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of take-off is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies” John Cleese
* “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
• “When a conductor forces the music out of his performers he gets what he deserves and nobody will remember him, when he allows his musicians to sing he achieves greatness.” Luciano Pavarotti
• “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust
• “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I'. And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I'. They don't think 'I'. They think 'we'; they think 'team'. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit.... This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” Peter. F Drucker
• “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” Woody Allen
• "Competitive advantage of the future is not going to be governed by available capital - but by our ability to utilise the intelligence and spirit of our people.” Arie de Geus
• “Worrying is praying for what you don't want.” Bill Harris
• “You only have to go as far as you can see; when you get there you will see more. But you have to know where you are going - and you have to know that you are going to get there.” Bob Proctor
• “We can't solve a paradox at the level of the paradox. We have to solve it at a higher level.” Eliot Jacques
• “You cannot outperform your self image. But you can change it.” Maxwell Maltz
• “They say that hard work never hurt anyone, but I figure why take the chance?” Fred Thompson
• “If you're losing good people, look to their manager …the manager is the reason people stay and thrive in an organisation. And he is also the reason why people leave.” Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
• “Sometimes a player's greatest challenge is coming to grips with his role on the team.” Scottie Pippen
• “Get rid of slogans.” W Edwards Deming
• " The parable of the cautious man “There was a very cautious man / who never laughed or cried. / He never risked, he never lost, / he never won, nor tried. / And when he one day passed away, / his insurance was denied. / For since he never really lived, / they claimed he never died!” Told by Ravi Sekharg
• “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.” Rene Descartes
• “Black fella, white fella/Yellow fella, any fella/It doesn’t matter what your colour/ As long as you are a true fella.” George Rrurrambu (Aboriginal songwriter, 1957-2007)
• “When you have given nothing, ask for nothing.” Albanian Proverb
• “it is a requirement for entering management to have the ability to make excuses for why it is impossible to do things that most people agree are important.” Jeffrey Pfeffer
• “Leadership is based on inspiration, not domination; on cooperation, not intimidation.” William Arthur Wood
• “If your day-to-day is making you miserable, your long-term prospects are not going to be much better.” David Dickter
• “Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.” Gordon R. Dickson
• “Skills shortages, and the need for continuous change, are forcing employers to recognise the strategic importance of learning and development. The survey shows that these professionals are the shock troops in the war for talent.” Charles Cotton CIPD Reward Adviser on the Personnel Rewards Survey 2007
• “If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” Moshe Dayan
• “By attempting to manage people you are limiting their potential.” Byron & Catherine Pulsifer
• “Management gets the workforce it deserves” Frederick Herzberg
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
• “This is a good time to be a guru. People want answers so badly they will listen to anything.” Richard Pascale
• “Ownership is about the way we feel about something, not how much we paid for it.” Tony Hines
• “First, we must understand what workers want. Then, we must give it to them!” David Sirota
• “This paper by its very length defends itself against being read.” Winston Churchill
• “When the best leader's work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’” Lao Tzu
• “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.” Abraham Lincoln
• “Over 70% of people leave their jobs because of the way they are led.” Norman Drummond
• “Change is disturbing when it is done to us, exhilarating when it is done by us.” Rosabeth Moss Cantor
• “Only 4% of an organisation's problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% by employees.” Sidney Yoshida
• “The working environment has become so socially toxic that many people are seeking early retirement.” Nick Baxter
• “You cannot change people, people can choose to change.” John Seddon
• “3% of problems have figures, 97% do not. It is people who count not the figures.” W Edwards Deming
• “A leader is best when people barely know that he exists.” Lao Tsu
• “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something, If we remember those times and places— and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however a small way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.” Howard Zinn
• “The most humble person in your organisation is the most important” Jack Cohen
• “People will forget what you said ... people will forget what you did ... but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Prashant Iyer
• "Players play, managers manage. Managing is too important to be a part-time pursuit. If you are a manager, concentrate on getting the best out of others” Pat Summit
• “Build people up instead of wearing them out.” Sam Deeks
• “Even now I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life / Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast. / Just for a small and a forgotten time I have had full in my eyes from off my girl / The whitest pouring of eternal light.” Chaura-panchasika, 1st century
• “Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.” Mary Hemingway
• “There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.” James Thurber
• “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Carl W. Buechner
• “The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart.” Benjamin Franklin
• “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.”Mahatma Gandhi
• “A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
• “Don’t be the Lone Ranger. Problem solving, like leadership in general, requires involvement of others. Remember that in any problem situation, your greatest resources are the people around you. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that you must solve every problem by yourself.” John Baldoni
• “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.” Aung San Suu Kyi
• “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.” Mother Teresa
• “Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.” Socrates
• “Management is what we do, leadership is what we feel” René Carayol
• “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.” Sir Winston Churchill
• “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “When you are through changing, you are through.” Bruce Barton
* “Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* “You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.” Harriet Martineau
* A senior manager told of how each member of his staff should feel after an appraisal. “Everyone must leave with a balloon” – in the mode of children leaving a birthday party. An email response to Cuttings 72
* “A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.” Wilson Mizner
* “I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's where the fun is.” Donald Trump
* “Leaders do many things. They inspire, motivate; they set strategy, they wield power: they align people: they set an example: they represent an organization to outsiders. More than anything else, however, leaders help the people around them make sense of the world in which they find themselves. Inspiring, strategizing and acting all depend on sense making... This 'sense making role is often underplayed... When leaders come to a shared understanding of the world, all their other jobs get easier.” Thomas Stewart
* “Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work” Frederick Herzberg
* “A sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organisation can have.” Pat Summit
* “Look after your people, The bottom line will look after itself.” Val Butcher
* “Remove the barriers that stop people from being as good as they can be.” W Edwards Deming
* “Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss, we won’t get fooled again.” Song lyric, The Who
* “Bosses don’t have to act like parents and workers don’t have to act like children” Ricardo Semler
* “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” Eugene Delacroix
* “There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity.” General Douglas MacArthur
* “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” Virginia Woolf
* “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
* “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
* “”I can't believe THAT!” said Alice. “Can't you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said, “one can't believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass
* “Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.” Kathleen Norris
* “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Edmund Burke
* "Things are only impossible until they're not.” Jean-Luc Picard
* “If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.” Gail Sheehy
* “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” Mark Twain
* “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Carl Jung
* “The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.” Andre Malrau
* “We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” Wernher von Braun
* “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Thomas Edison
* “You may delay, but time will not.” Benjamin Franklin
* “Confidence comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong.” Peter T. Mcintye
* “People would rather do a good job than a bad job. But if you pay them to do a bad job, they'll do a bad job.” W Edwards Deming
* “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” Seneca
* “If the image means something to you, you can make it mean something to someone else. If it doesn’t mean something to you, it can come across as fake and then you will be worse off than before.” Richard Olivier
* “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” Eleanor Roosevelt
* “The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.” C. Northcote Parkinson
* “If you can't go where people are happier, try to make people happier where you are.” Ashleigh Brilliant
* “Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation. For when you come back to your work, your judgement will be surer.” Leonardo da Vinci
* “People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.” Charles Ketterin
* “You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
* “If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way.” Buddha
* “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims” Buckminster Fuller
* “What you cannot enforce, do not command.” Sophocles
* “It is better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret.” Jackie Joyner-Kersey
* “Human beings never feel close, never develop trust or are influenced by the thinking of people that they don't believe listen to them, invite their thoughts and ideas, and need them as an asset in the relationship rather than an object done to or a recipient done or provided for.” Stephen Glen
* “What you DO comes later. First, what do you want to BE?” Robert Greenleaf
* “Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a different way to stand.”
Oprah Winfrey
* “Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.” William Shakespeare
* “There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
* “I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” Daniel Boone
* “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” Will Rogers
* “Either lead, follow, or get out of the way” Military aphorism
* “That which soldiers are willing to sacrifice their lives for – loyalty, team-spirit, morale, trust and confidence – cannot be infused by managing.” General Edward C Meyer
* “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson
* “When the times get tough, the last thing companies should do is make sacrifices on the human side. You should do the exact reverse. When times get tough, it's the leaders that you have that are going to carry you through it.” Jerry Grandey, CEO Cameco, RSA
* The leadership style of Barack Obama: In listening to two hours of CNN the night after the election here are a few of the words various people used to describe him: Competitive; Winner; In touch with his people; Smart Intelligent; Calm; Gracious; Trusted; Empowering; Inspiring; Respected; Honest; Knows it’s not about him; Visionary; Great communicator.
* “If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.” Barack Obama
And then some others …
* “There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognised by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everybody can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along." Mary McCarthy
* “If I just looked at the crowd, I would never start" Mother Theresa
* Employees who responded more positively to Gallup's Q12 also worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction.” Buckingham & Coffman
* “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."
Pablo Picasso
* “What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, of
uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully." Charles Victor Cherbuliez
* "The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination." John Schaar
* There’s an old story about Arthur Rubenstein, the famous concert pianist. After a particularly stirring performance, a woman comes up to Rubenstein and exclaims, "That was wonderful! I’d give my life to be able to play like that." And he looks her in the eye and simply answers, "I did."
* When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice. Navajo chant used to open this year’s International Coach Federation Annual Conference.
* “The nights are pregnant and no one knows the day that will be born” Turkish proverb
* “If you want to know what's really going on in most companies, you talk to the guy who sweeps the floors. Nine times out of ten, he knows more than the president.” Kenneth Hendricks
* “Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or to conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?” David Bohm
* “It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."” Picasso
* “Who hath not served cannot command.” John Florio, 1578
* “I am trying to think of good leaders who haven’t been good communicators and I can’t think of one.” Rev Chaffey, RAF
* “Listening is much more taxing than we might think.” Todd Rogers
* “People don’t hate change, they hate how you’re trying to change them” Michael Kanazawa
* “…help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around–when yellow will be mellow–when the red man can get ahead, man–and when white will embrace what is right.” Rev. Joseph Lowery at the inauguration of President Barak Obama
* “We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.” Lyndon B. Johnson
* “Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.” Og Mandino
* “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Mohandas Gandhi
* Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes,
* “Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Charles Elachi
* “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
* “Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed.” Sydney Smith
* “There are worse things than looking stupid. Sleeping through life is one of them.” Laura Preble
* “The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.” Oliver Wendell Holmes
* “Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.” Paulo Coelho
* “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." Carl Jung
* “Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.” Malcolm Forbes
* “Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.” Plato
* “How you choose to respond each moment to the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends.” Doc Childre
* “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” Rumi
* “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.” Kahlil Gibran
* “When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.” HH the Dalai Lama
* “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.” Duke Ellington
* “You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward it, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.” Brian Tracy
* “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman
* “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” Paul Boese
* “There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.” Jonas Salk
* “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.” Samuel Johnson
* “Treating people with respect will gain one wide acceptance and improve business.” Tao Zhu Gong (500 BC)
* “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” Maria Robinson
* “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” John Lennon
* “It takes a long time to become young.” Pablo Picasso
* “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” Helen Keller
* “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." Lyndon B. Johnson
* “Leadership is the ability to make wise adept choices, both singularly and collectively, by persons who courageously serve the welcoming promise of authenticity.” Bob Terry
* “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” Persian proverb
* “The next best thing to knowing something is to know where to find it.” Samuel Johnson
* “There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.” Christopher Morley
* “Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” Joel Barker
* “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” Tennessee Williams
* “What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.” Bodie Thoene
* “Everyone stumbles over the truth from time to time, but most people pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing ever happened.” Winston Churchill
* “First weigh the considerations, then take the risks.” Helmuth von Moltke
• “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” Jonas Salk
• “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Mother Teresa
• “People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.” Audrey Hepburn
• “Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.” Franklin P. Adams
• “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman
• “In all things it is better to hope than to despair.” Goethe
• “You never find yourself until you face the truth.” Pearl Bailey
• "We have a plan, therefore nothing can go wrong.” Spike Milligan
• “If we cannot learn from history, we are condemned to repeat it.” Georges Santayana
• “When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.” William James
• “One must know not just how to accept a gift, but with what grace to share it.” Maya Angelou
• “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.” Stuart Chase
• “Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now–always and indeed then most truly when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.” Albert Schweitzer
• “If you really want to do something, you do it. You don't save it for a sound bite.” Liz Friedman
• “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” William Shakespeare
• “It is not so important to know everything as to appreciate what we learn.” Hannah More
• “Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.” Viktor Frankl
• “It is the sweet, simple things in life which are the real ones after all.” Laura Ingalls Wilder
• “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” Roy Disney
• “The value of life is not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet very little.” Michel de Montaigne
• “Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.” HH Dalai Lama
• “Begin growing from where you are - not from where others think you ought to be by now.” Steven Douglas Lawrence
• “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.” Stephen Covey
• “Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” Reggie Leach
• “Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.” Vincent Van Gogh
• “Leadership is about the ability to influence people by personal attributes and behaviours.” John Adair
• “Leadership is the activity of influencing people to cooperate toward some goal which they come to find desirable.” Ordway Tead
• “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” John F. Kennedy
• “Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.” Raymond Lindquist
• “At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.” Marshall B Rosenberg
• “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” Marc Chagall
• “Our aspirations are our possibilities.” Samuel Johnson
• “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” Jesse Jackson
• “It's not to late to ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be.” Morrie Schwartz
• “Impossible is a word humans use far too often.” Jeri Ryan
• “Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.” Doug Larson
• “We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realise.” Thich Nhat Hanh
