Management Quotes

Subsidy delays adjustment and innovation rather than promoting it. . . . Ongoing subsidies dull incentives and create an attitude of dependence. Government support makes it difficult to get industry to invest and take risk without it. Attention is focused on renewing subsidies rather than [on] creating true competitive advantage. One subsidized industry propagates its noncompetitiveness to others. Once started, subsidy is difficult to stop. What is worse, subsidies to one ailing industry encourage others to seek them.
— Michael Porter

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Government

If you want ideas for solving your business problems to pop out of your people, the first, and most often neglected step, is to ask them. Just ask them. It’s so easy to do, and so rarely done. Show your people that they have been hired for their minds as well as their bodies. Provide training to enhance their creative thinking skills and establish a system to regularly solicit their ideas. Expect them to think, to create, then reward them for it.

Once you have new ideas popping, you need a soft, warm place for them to land. New ideas are fragile. They’re rarely in perfectly finished form. They need to be evaluated and developed with a nurturing, respectful attitude if you expect more ideas to follow. Show that you see value in every idea and want every idea to succeed, because you do. Every solid, implementable, fully developed idea brings you closer to achieving your Mission. Make certain you have an environment which actively invites, develops, and uses your people’s ideas. You can’t get enough of them.
— Katherine Catlin

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Innovation and Management

The most powerful force subverting conventional value chains, partly because it acts as a catalyst and accelerator for all the others, is a revolution in the economics of information. Information has always been the glue that held value chains together. The cost of getting sufficiently rich information to suppliers, channels, and customers made proprietary information systems and dedicated assets a necessity, and gave vertical integration its leverage.

That glue is now melting. Universal connectivity and common communications standards are enabling the open and virtually cost-free exchange of information of all kinds. Companies share product designs, CAD/CAM parameters, logistics information, and financial data with equal ease both inside and outside the corporation. New intermediaries are emerging to support interconnection, facilitate comparison, guarantee performance, and make markets. Searching and switching are vastly simpler and cheaper than they used to be.

These trends have two simultaneous effects. On the one hand, proprietary links give way to markets. Witness the outsourcing trend: companies can now make use of key activities in the value chain without owning them. On the other hand, opportunities for rich communication and collaboration between customers and suppliers are greater than ever. Both these developments undermine vertical integration, replacing it with a highly flexible mix of new coordination mechanisms, ranging from the ruthlessness of the spot market at one extreme to the most strategic of partnerships at the other.
— Carl Stern

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Information and Strategy

In a deconstructed value chain, one of the surest paths to dominance is to establish a standard in a key business layer…The existence of standards benefits consumers in two fundamental ways. In the layer itself, a single standard greatly expands value for consumers by allowing them to take advantage of powerful network effects…Standards also have an enormous second-order economic impact. The adoption of a standard makes products that conform to it more substitutable, radically lowering costs throughout the entire value chain.
— Todd Hixon

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Strategy

He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.
— Lao Tzu

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Personal Development and Power / Authority

How can you recognize leadership potential in a young person? The most important clue is whether the person has identified and sought out a work situation in which he or she feels real passion. If a person doesn’t have the drive or ability to get his or her own situation right, how will he or she be able to do this for a company?
— Jonathan Byrnes

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership

Someday your current job will be a line entry on your resume. Under the entry, you’ll have two or three bullets to describe your major accomplishments. “Did a good job of doing what always was done” can’t be one of them.

There is a lot of power in reflecting at the beginning of a new job on what you want the two or three bullets to be, and deliberately setting about building them over the course of your job tenure. Otherwise, you run the risk of having them simply be the incidental byproduct of what opportunities happened to come your way.
— Jonathan Byrnes

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Career

Whether inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing that I can do is to make sure it finds me at work.
— Pablo Picasso

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Innovation and Work

I strongly believe in luck and find out that the more I work, the luckier I am.
— Stehpen Leacock

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Luck

There’s a door through which good luck enters, but you have the key.
— Japanese Proverb

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Luck