Management Quotes

“The customer comes first” is one of the three great lies of the modern corporation. The other two: “We make our decisions on behalf of our shareholders” and, “Employees are our most important asset.”
— Art Kleiner

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management

We have the challenge of making things standardized without letting standardization itself become the new straitjacket. First, I believe that it may kill off common sense—for which I have a high regard—because people honestly believe that the system is what you want them to do, rather than what is sensible. And second, I think it’s the mavericks and maverick thinkers in all of our organizations who really bring the best innovations and improvements.
— Linda Huett

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Innovation and Management

CRM was originally intended to provide sales reps with a system for managing information about their contacts. But it’s grown into an eight-headed monster with ambitions to improve customer loyalty, enhance sales-force efficiency, and enlarge management control. Typical implementations, though, have done none of these well. Why?

The answer, in part, is simply that many companies’ reach has exceeded their grasp. They’ve designed overly ambitious and complex CRM systems that they can’t implement effectively. Worse, many of the solution designs have such a limited understanding of how a company grows that even if they’re perfectly implemented, they fail to deliver the intended benefits. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to many IT professionals, everything looks like a process. In supporting your company’s growth ambitions, this is a dangerously narrow viewpoint that limits IT’s impact on the company’s growth performance.
— Michael Treacy with Nicole Ames

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Customer Related and IT / Internet / E-Business

‘War’, Clemenceau is supposed to have said, ‘is too important to be left the generals’. Today, the business of satisfying the customer is far too important to be left to the marketing department.
— Charles Alexander

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Customer Related and Marketing

The first thing a leader needs to understand is how the organization is feeling – is it very proud of what it is achieving? And that’s a contact issue and a “smell” issue as you “go walkabout.”

The second thing you notice when things are going right is that people take more risks. People understand that we’re in a risk business. Capitalism is about taking risks and getting rewards. And the better the risks you can take, and the more risks you take that are rewarded, the better job you’re going to do. When an organization is defensive and not prepared to make mistakes and take risks, you’ve got a real problem. You can access the feeling about risk from the way people talk – are they becoming more open-minded to risk? Are they prepared to fail? Those are things that I love to hear within the organization. I also love to hear people encouraging one another to take risks and supporting each other’s risks within the organization. This is what I’m really looking for.
— The Lord Simon of Highbury (former Chairman of Bri

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Organizational Behavior

What actually drives the organization to change – irrespective of what a so-called leader or change leader does, in my view – is its pride in performance. You see change in many, many companies. It can come through fear. It can come through stimulation. It can come through the need to turn failure into success. But to my mind the most continuously effective way of changing any organization is to develop pride in performance, so that people themselves want to change.

And that pride should go as far as possible down the organization. So there are good aids and bad aids to change. Fear is a bad aid in an organization, but you sure can use it as a leader if you see performance under pressure. It won’t help you in the long run, but it focuses people’s minds. Pride, on the other hand, is a great long-run determinant of performance and change.
— The Lord Simon of Highbury (former Chairman of Bri

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Change Management and Organizational Behavior

What do I look for in our leadership? I look for curiosity. I look for competence. I look for humanity. And I look for commitment. To me, those things are very, very important. I like people to enjoy getting out of bed every morning and coming to work. I like them to feel that they’re committed to solving problems and contributing, and that every day they like the people they work with and they’re going to feel a little better about it.

One of the toughest things executives have to learn, as we go up the scale in any organization or want to be considered capable of leadership, is that people within the organization try to analyze what it is that makes us tick. So if we don’t exhibit these characteristics ourselves on a continuous basis, it’s hardly surprising if nobody else does. Because they’re bound to look to us for clues. That’s what leadership’s about. So we have to offer clues and signals in our own behavior that are compatible with what we want the organization to do.
— The Lord Simon of Highbury (former Chairman of Bri

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership

I always tell people, if you think everything is about race, you’re going to be in a perpetual state of rage. If you think nothing that happens in life is about race, you are in a state of vapor. It is a matter of balancing this business of race and what role it plays.
— Crystal Dewberry

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Diversity

Socrates says that writing forces us to follow an argument rather than to participate in it, and I think you see that all the time when the professor is giving a lecture. Students are writing their notes, trying to follow the argument, and abandon any hope of participating in it.
— Neil Postman

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Communication and Education

Typically, cost reductions are delayed, are across-the-board (eliminate 10 percent, say, from every department) and are not oriented toward what the business design should be at the end of the reduction effort. Consequently, the effort usually fails. In fact, cost reduction and internal re-engineering approaches more often than not misconstrue the fundamental nature of the problem. The point is not to become more efficient at activities that are losing customer and economic relevance, but to alter the business design in a way that matches customer demands and is consistent with the new economic order in your industry.
— Benson P. Shapiro, Adrian J. Slywotzky and Richard

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Reorganization