Management Quotes

The central challenge of a segmentation strategy isn’t how to develop one—a variety of approaches work—but how to make it useful and integrate it into a company’s ongoing planning and performance-management efforts. The segmentation must explicitly link corporate financial objectives to the behavior of people in a segment and to customer experience goals. This linkage allows general managers and marketers to understand how the experiences of valued customers influence behavior and how behavioral shifts drive core product or service objectives. It also provides predictive (as opposed to static) measures of customer profitability.
— Sean R. Collins, Peter W. Dahlström, and Marc Singer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing

If you can put a box around each person, their role and their relationships – if you can actually draw a diagram with boxes and arrows – that’s a far more simplistic model than a company full of very passionate, very creative people all bringing their backgrounds, experiences and visions to a project, and having them all rowing the boat in the same direction.
— Dean Kamen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior

We attempt to treat everyone fairly, but treating people fairly is not the same as treating them equally. People are not equal. And I think people don’t want to be equal for many reasons. Most people want to be individuals; they want to excel at something. And the definition of excelling means, “I’m going to prove just how unequal I am.” I don’t think there’s a problem with recognizing that different people have different strengths – not better, not worse, just different.
— Dean Kamen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Organizational Behavior

We use a series of tests and evaluations that produce data that often proves we don’t have a workable solution. The rest of the world would characterize this as a failure. I would characterize this as an exhaustive study of many ways to apply technologies to needs to determine those that fit and those that do not. It’s a mistake to make decisions solely by counting up the number of successes compared to failures in this process. Often, big companies do that, basing decisions on the idea of maximizing the number of concepts that succeed verses those that fail. I would say you have to change the metrics. Success is two-fold:—first, getting through the evaluation and decision process quickly and efficiently without allowing team members to be damaged by failure; and second, finding a match between great technology and a really important need. Everyone will have gone through the travails of the various alternatives considered and everyone will share in the success when that project becomes a product.
— Dean Kamen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Failure and Success

I do not believe you can manage people at all. You can manage all sorts of things in an environment that are frankly pretty perfunctory to allow people to achieve their goals – you manage the schedule, you manage the budget. But, you lead people.

If your interaction with a person ends with you thinking, “I need to manage what they do, or how they do it,” then you need to ask yourself some questions: Did I make a mistake assigning this person to this position? Did I make the goals clear? Were there enough resources available to get the job done?
— Dean Kamen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Management

Leaders teach. Teaching and leading are distinguishable occupations, but every great leader teaches–and every great teacher is leading.
— John W. Gardner

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Teaching

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough.
— Frank Crane

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Trust

When this [Web 2.0] model allows many new ideas, then the cost of solving problems and of generating content will go down. It also means the cost and the need for filtering will go up. You will need to filter not only for what’s good versus what’s bad but also for what fits your strategy. Not every idea will work given your asset base, your strengths, and your differentiation. The challenge will not be to find the smart people or ideas but to find a way to teach your whole company to filter on the same set of ideas.
— Nilofer Merchant

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Content / Context and Trends / Analysis

Organizations are effective to the extent that they attempt to satisfy the interests of participating individuals. It is only when persons feel that their own interests are protected by some equitable distribution principle that they may value the overall attainment of a collective outcome or goal.
— Michael Keeley

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior

Marketing has a long history of paying attention to measurement and the creation of metrics, especially when it comes to claiming success, but little has been done to standardize the way that marketing defines success. The problem is that most of the metrics used to assess the outcomes of marketing activities are tactical and not directly relevant to the overall financial performance of the firm. Furthermore, while the financial results of many firms depend on marketing, the link between traditional marketing metrics and the financial performance of the firm is seldom explicit.
— David W. Stewart, PhD

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing and Measurement