Management Quotes

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
— Helen Keller

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Ambition and Commitment

When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don’t know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.

Here’s the kicker: in order to teach a skill, you have to go backward, from being unconsciously competent to being consciously competent. Until you can teach it, moreover, you don’t really know what you know.
— ZingTrain

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Competence and Knowledge

Marketing puts the public face on the brand. Customers’ experiences are influenced by how the promise of the brand is delivered through the call center, distribution channels, billing and service departments - in short, the Brand-Customer Relationship.
— Scott Davis

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing

The catch-22 that early-stage companies always face is that they must weigh the advantage of time to market against the risk of not building a strong enough foundation. The situation gets played out in almost every decision made: product completeness versus product breadth, distribution strategy, capital structure, geography. Entrepreneurial companies have to fight that trade-off all the time.
— Dan Case (former CEO of Hambrecht & Quist)

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Entrepreneurship

People tend to become so engrossed in activity that they lose sight of purpose.
— Dr. George S. Odiorne, author of Management and th

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Personality / Behavior and Work

One of the greatest myths going is that you’ve got to create a family-friendly company in order to recruit and retain talented employees. Well, you absolutely have to do so, but the myth is thinking that family-friendly policies are going to solve the problem of overwork. I know company after company with generous family-leave policies that enable employees to take sabbaticals and to take time off for this or that, but you know what? It turns out that employees aren’t taking advantage of any of these so-called family-friendly amenities. They’re not doing so because of the nature of competition. They understand implicitly that if they’re not on the fast track, they’re going to be on the slow track. And it’s not because of anything nefarious on the part of the company-it’s the nature of competition these days.
— Robert Reich

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Career and Organizational Behavior

Earnings have proven to be a poor tool for valuing companies, and not just because they are subjectively determined. Earnings also ignore the crucial consideration of the cost of capital.
— Justin Jenk, Patricia Anslinger and John J. Ballow

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Finance and Investing

Often the term “business model” is used more or less synonymously with “business strategy.” For example, Adrian Slywotzky describes it as “the totality of how a company selects its customers, defines and differentiates its offerings (or response), defines the tasks it will perform itself and those it will outsource, configures its resources, goes to market, creates utility for customers, and captures profits. It is the entire system for delivering utility to customers and earning a profit from that activity.”

Our view is narrower than this. Quite simply, a business model refers to the core architecture of a firm, specifically how it deploys all relevant resources (not just those within its corporate boundaries) to create differentiated value for customers.
— Don Tapscott

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Business Plans and Strategy

People who don’t share our values are cancerous to the organization, regardless of their performance. In my experience, every time you invest trying to save these people you end up regretting it. It’s simply too difficult to change people’s values.
— Robert Knowling

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources and Organizational Behavior

The absence of a vision will doom any strategy — especially a strategy for change. A true vision shapes your hiring, assessment, and promotion of employees, and your behavior toward customers, partners, and investors. It is a more powerful tool for leading an organization than any market analysis or spreadsheet…I invest our resources in vision and values because company culture is inseparable from strategy — and because I don’t want to wake up one day and have a profitable organization that does not have a soul.
— Robert Knowling

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior and Vision