Management Quotes

Where traditional selling advocates that every prospect is a likely customer, and ‘goes for the yes,’ the diagnostic process gives salespeople permission to ‘go for the no.’ Most inefficiencies in sales come from spending too much time with too many prospects. The real skill in selling lies in recognizing the seven or eight out of ten who won’t buy, due to realistic observable conditions, and setting them aside temporarily or permanently.
— Jeff Thull

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Sales

Your solution may not solve your client’s problem-or your client may not even have a problem. So why should you feel you’ve failed when there is no sale? A salesperson should no more make a presentation to every prospect than a physician should prescribe medication for every patient.
— Jeff Thull

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Sales

The world economic system is like a global highway – a network of linkages and laws that allows ideas, goods and capital to circulate quickly. But there is one big problem with this highway: it does not have enough access roads. It bypasses too many poor and marginalised communities and there are not enough institutions – economic, social, legal and political – to enable people at all economic levels to participate in the emerging global economic system.

If globalisation is to work for the majority of the world’s population, nations and governments everywhere will have to find ways to connect people everywhere to this global highway. It will take millions of new institutions to do this – a challenge that will demand extraordinary human initiative and mobilisation of resources. In order to achieve this, a particular type of actor will become increasingly active on the world stage: the social entrepreneur.
— David Bornstein

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and International

We should stop talking about ‘company and society’. We should talk about ‘company in society’. The market is always situated in social contexts; society should not be subordinated to the market. There are no alternatives to globalisation without companies – the point is, though, that not all models of companies are acceptable or viable in a globalised world.
— Laszlo Zsolnai

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / International and Social Responsibility

The economic case for free trade is that it produces mutual gains for countries. These gains arise from the workings of the principle of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage results from different countries having different opportunity costs of producing one traded good in terms of another; for example, the cost of a gallon of wine in terms of yards of cloth. The ratios of wine to cloth differ among countries due to inherent differences (in this case, differences in climate and soil). These different relative cost ratios are the reason why it pays to specialise and to trade.

In order for resources to be allocated within each country in keeping with comparative advantage, factors of production must be relatively immobile internationally. Otherwise, factors of production would be allocated according to absolute advantage and would move abroad to where their productivity is higher.

The operation of absolute advantage is what we see today. Labour is most productive where capital is most abundant, and capital is most productive where labour is most abundant. Thus, we observe developing world labour moving across borders physically and electronically to first-world countries where capital is abundant, and we observe first-world capital and technology moving to countries where labour is abundant and inexpensive.

Comparative advantage has now disappeared from the picture. Today, factors of production are more mobile internationally than are traded goods.
— Paul Craig Roberts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and International

Economists are blind to the loss of US industries and occupations, because they believe these results reflect the beneficial workings of free trade. Whatever is being lost, they think, is being replaced by something as good or better. They are unable to identify what the replacement industries and occupations are, but they are certain they are out there somewhere. It does not occur to them that the same incentive (cheap, skilled foreign labour) that causes the loss of one tradable good or service applies to all tradable goods and services. There is no reason why the ‘replacement industry’ or knowledge job will not simply follow its predecessor offshore.

Economists misunderstand outsourcing because they have not got to grips with the challenge presented to comparative advantage by highly mobile factors of production and by production functions based on acquired knowledge. Their belief that free trade always makes trading countries better off demonstrates that economists are also unfamiliar with the latest development in trade theory.
— Paul Craig Roberts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Outsourcing

Globalisation offers short-term opportunities: economies of scale, efficiencies from larger markets, and cost savings from cheaper production or services. But with the ‘quick buck’ comes greater vulnerability. As the business chain lengthens, the risk of failure from one weak link increases. Risks – structural and reputational – are compounded as business extends around the world.
— Willem Bröcker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and International

When I was at Stanford a professor of organizational behavior told a bunch of us, “You folks kill me. You’ve spent all your time on economics, on statistics, on policy, on accounting. Those of you that are going to end up running businesses, you’re going to hire economists and CFOs and IT people and statisticians. But what it’s all about is motivating people; it’s getting to know people.” That was one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got. Don’t lose the human side of business, don’t lose the organizational side. Because if you do, you’re only going to get so far.
— Carl Pascarella

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / MBA Related and Organizational Behavior

There are two thoughts that often get lost in the discussion about being effective in building and using influence: Don’t assume you have all the right answers—that’s why a strong team is essential. And, above all, do the right thing—not only for business or economic impact, but also for social and philosophical implications. Ultimately, power is the ability to influence and facilitate change, and people naturally rally around leaders who do the right thing consistently.
— Ralph Szygenda

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Influence and Power / Authority

One thing we can claim with complete confidence is that fear is indispensable to courage, that it must always be present for courage to exist. You must be afraid to have courage. Suffering is not, by itself, courage; choosing to suffer what we fear is. And yet, too great a distinction is made between moral courage and physical courage. They are in many instances the same. For either to be authentic, it must encounter fear and prove itself superior to that fear. By fear, I mean the kind that entails serious harm to ourselves, physical or otherwise, the kind that wars with our need to take action but which we overcome because we value something or someone more than our own well-being. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.

…If fear is a condition of courage, so too is love. It is love that makes us willing to sacrifice, love that gives us courage…Love makes courage necessary. And it’s love that makes courage possible for all of us to possess. You get courage by loving something more than your own well-being. When you love virtue, when you love freedom, when you love other people, you find the strength to demand courage of yourself and of those who aspire to lead you. Only then will you find the courage, as Eleanor Roosevelt put it, “to do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— John McCain

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Courage and Leadership