Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.
The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.
No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.
If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.
You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.
Entrepreneurs believe that profit is what matters most in a new enterprise. But profit is secondary. Cash flow matters most.
There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"
The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.
Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.
An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.
Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.
Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.
Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.
Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.
Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.
An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.
Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity.
Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.
I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.
It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.
Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.
The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.
Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.
The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.
There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.
In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.
Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"
The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.
We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.
We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem - which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.
If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.
Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government
Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.