In Search Of Excellence Quotes
"The picture of the thing is not the thing."
"If we want change, we fiddle with the strategy."
"The most helpful ideas were coming from the strangest places."
"The crucial problems in strategy were most often those of execution and continuous adaptation: getting it done, staying flexible."
"It is attention to employees, not work conditions per se, that has the dominant impact on productivity."
"A leader’s role is to harness the social forces in the organization, to shape and guide values."
"What fascinated us even more than the effort in The Netherlands, however, was the reaction we subsequently got from a few companies like HP and 3M that we had contacted in preparation for our discussions with Shell."
"They persisted. They insisted on top quality. They fawned on their customers."
"The process of acquiring or sharpening the basics to anything like the excellent companies’ obsessive level, after all, is a lot harder than coming up with a 'strategic breakthrough' in one’s head."
"Rational means sensible, logical, reasonable, a conclusion flowing from a correct statement of the problem."
"People like their own children a lot, and typically aren’t that interested in other people’s babies."
"But if America is to regain its competitive position in the world, or even hold what it has, we have to stop overdoing things on the rational side."
"The central problem with the rationalist view of organizing people is that people are not very rational."
"All of us are self-centered, suckers for a bit of praise, and generally like to think of ourselves as winners."
"Our imaginative, symbolic right brain is at least as important as our rational, deductive left."
"We are creatures of our environment, very sensitive and responsive to external rewards and punishment."
"We act as if express beliefs are important, yet action speaks louder than words."
"We desperately need meaning in our lives and will sacrifice a great deal to institutions that will provide meaning for us."
"We all think we’re tops. We’re exuberantly, wildly irrational about ourselves."
"Label a man a loser and he’ll start acting like one."
"The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play or rest."
"The function of an executive is to find a happy joinder of means and ends."
"The fundamental process is an elusive one; it is, in large part, to make conscious what lies unconscious among followers."
"Efficiency as an operating ideal presumes goals are settled and resources available."
"The assumptions of Theory Y do not deny the appropriateness of authority."
"Profit is like health. You need it, and the more the better. But it’s not why you exist."
"The most crucial process going on in any company may be the continuing interpretation of historic events and adjustment of the dominating business idea in that context." - Richard Normann
"Firms operating out of Rochester, New York e.g.,Kodake.g., Kodake.g.,Kodak, or Midland, Michigan e.g.,Dowe.g., Dowe.g.,Dow, often have very strong corporate cultures. Much stronger than firms that operate out of New York City or Los Angeles." - Stanley Davis
"The leaderleaderleader not only creates the rational and tangible aspects of organizations, such as structure and technology, but also is the creator of symbols, ideologies, language, beliefs, rituals, and myths." - Andrew Pettigrew
"It is not so much the articulation of goals about what an institutioninstitutioninstitution should be doing that creates new practice. It’s the imagery that creates the understanding, the compelling moral necessity that the new way is right." - Warren Bennis
"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen
"Ready. Fire. Aim." - Executive at Cadbury’s
"The executiveexecutiveexecutive ability to change course quickly has rescued the company from some of its bad decisions." - Jesse Aweida, president of Storage Technology
"I often believe that making a decision, even a bad decision, is better than making no decision at all." - Jesse Aweida
"Do it, fix it, try it." - Common axiom in business
"A one-page memo helps a lot. It focuses the mind."
"If you can’t get the one page clear, it isn’t likely you’ll get far with the novel."
"Tradition has it that the typical first memo by an assistant brand manager or young brand manager requires at least fifteen drafts."
"The power of the one-page memo is that its real impact goes much deeper than this partial list of traits."
"Charles Ames, talking about his earlier experience at Reliance, speaks of the love affair with complex systems that often hides an inability to manage the basics."
"Virtually any system can be cleaned up and made simple."
"The major complaint about organizations is that they have become more complex than is necessary."
"Probably the most important management fundamental that is being ignored today is staying close to the customer to satisfy his needs and anticipate his wants."
"The good news from the excellent companies is the extent to which, and the intensity with which, the customers intrude into every nook and cranny of the business."
"No existing management theory helps much in explaining the role of the customer in the prototypical excellent company."
"The case was nicely expressed by HP’s John Doyle (head of R&D)."
"Service, quality, reliability are strategies aimed at loyalty and long-term revenue stream growth (and maintenance)."
"The best companies are pushed around by their customers, and they love it."
"The excellent companies are better listeners."
"The customer is truly in a partnership with the effective companies, and vice versa."
"The principal reasons mentioned by respondents were: 'No inquiries of users at all', 'Too few inquiries or atypical users', 'Ignored the (users’) answers or misinterpreted', 'No on-the-spot investigations of user techniques', 'Committed to preconceived design'."
"We distrust any simple answer and aren’t trying to push one ourselves. All three factors — users, competitors, technology — are essential."
"Leaders in the sophisticated control business, such as Allen-Bradley, were driven to test robotics not by their central labs, but by their giant customers."
"The top 'better listeners,' then, pay especially close attention to their lead users."
"Listening or sleuthing of this class, at or near the edge of the state of the art, is a long way from commissioning polls or convening panels to discuss yesterday’s tastes."
"The new idea either finds a champion or dies."
"If big companies don’t stop innovating entirely, the rate almost certainly goes way down."
"Perhaps the most important element of their enviable track record is an ability to be big and yet to act small at the same time."
"They were creating almost radical decentralization and autonomy, with its attendant overlap, messiness around the edges, lack of coordination, internal competition, and somewhat chaotic conditions, in order to breed the entrepreneurial spirit."
"All the activity and apparent confusion we were observing revolves around fired-up 'champions' and around making sure that the potential innovator, or champion, comes forward, grows, and flourishes."
"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."
"Nothing more effectively involves people, sustains credibility or generates enthusiasm than face-to-face communication."
"We have an obligation to provide training and the opportunity for development to our productive people who want to improve their skills."
"It is essential to provide job security for our people."
"Create incentive programs that rely on ideas and suggestions, as well as on hard work, to establish a reward pool."
"Almost every executive agrees that people are the most important asset. Yet almost none really lives it."
"Personal productivity of the top managers is a vital symbol."
"The philosophy comes first. Almost every executive agrees that people are the most important asset."
"The key is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say."
"Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys."
"We didn’t waste time with foolishness. We didn’t have procedures, we didn’t have lots of staff people."
"Most acquisitions go awry. Not only are the synergies seldom realized; more often than not the result is catastrophic."
"Organizations that do branch out but stick very close to their knitting outperform the others."
"The most successful companies diversify around a single skill."
"Unchanneled diversification is a losing proposition."
"Firms frequently develop new products and enter new businesses, but are loath to invest in areas unfamiliar to management."
"The guiding qualitative value and the hands-on approach are at war with diversification strategies."
"It isn’t credible for an electronic’s executive to talk about quality in a consumer goods business."
"With merger mania prevalent, it's worth illustrating the almost total absence of rigorous support for very diversified business combinations."
"The excellent companies don’t test new waters with both feet."
"‘Never acquire any businesses that you don’t know how to run.’"
"A simple rule followed by successful companies: Acquire small businesses that can be readily assimilated."
"Acquiring and diversifying in an experimental fashion, in manageable steps, contains risks."
"The complexity in big companies is met with complex systems, which is where the mistake begins."
"Keeping things simple is crucial for an organization to pull together."
"Matrix structures often dilute priorities and say, 'Everything is important; pay equal attention to everything.'"
"The excellent companies avoid complexity with a basic simplicity of form."
"A simple underlying form, like the product division, provides stability and simplicity."
"Excessive staff at the corporate level can hinder, rather than help, an organization."
"The focus on the outside, the external perspective, the attention to the customer, is one of the tightest properties."
"Quality leads to excitement, an external focus, and is a goad to productivity."
"In the excellent companies, autonomy is a product of discipline."
"Shared values and rules about discipline, details, and execution can foster practical autonomy and experimentation."
"The excellent companies are not really ‘long-term thinkers’ but have a value set for all seasons."
"Every day is an opportunity to act in support of overarching themes."
"The people who lead the excellent companies are a bit simplistic, focused on the external, on service, on quality, on people."