Management Quotes

Michael Porter (1996), in his influential article “What is Strategy”, called cost reduction, quality improvement and customer service operational effectiveness. He argued they are not strategy because, one cannot choose to market products of competitively low quality. One cannot afford to say one will not reduce costs, or will serve customers poorly.

Strategy is about creating value for customers. In this respect operational efficiencies and strategy are alike. But that is where similarities end. Strategy is about making choices. If you take one road you cannot take another. Unlike strategy operational efficiency, or operational effectiveness as Porter called them, is a never-ending demand of the market place. It is complementary to strategy, not an alternative to it.
— V N Bhattacharya

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Strategy

Education…is not confined to time or space, it is an attitude, a constant search for learning founded on an insatiable curiosity. An “educated” person is not only someone who knows a great deal, but someone who wishes to learn in any circumstance, who poses questions, who probes, reflects and assimilates, to gain both knowledge and wisdom.
— Jean-Pierre Lehmann

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Education

The performance culture really is in deep conflict with the learning culture. It’s an unusual executive who can balance these.
— Paul J. H. Schoemaker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Learning and Management

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
— Jeffrey Kluger

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Decision and Risk

Trust is essential, especially in any complex purchase that can be intellectually intimidating. You have to establish trust before you can build a relationship. And you have to build the relationship before you can win real business.

You create credibility that leads to trust by doing three things: (1) demonstrating your empathy and understanding of the prospect’s concerns; (2) telling stories that illustrate your value to real people in real situations; and (3) sharing expertise that has immediate, practical value for your prospects.
— Jonathan Kranz

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Sales and Trust

I don’t think people are cognizant at all [of the tradeoffs they're making]. Where do we suppose the great deals come from? They come from companies that are buying abroad, pushing down real wages, fighting unions, rewarding any executive ruthless enough to slash costs, doing all sorts of things to get the best deals for consumers and investors. The citizen side of our brains might continue to rail against companies that are doing all this, without understanding that the companies are doing it because the consumers and investors in us are demanding that they do so. The consumer-investor lobe of our brains doesn’t really talk much to the citizen lobe. The cognitive dissonance is powerful.
— Robert Reich

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Capitalism and Economics

We have many young people now getting their MBAs and looking toward a life in which they can do well and do good, working for a corporation that is socially responsible. I think they’re fooling themselves. I would rather those young people, if they’re genuinely concerned about the state of the planet, roll up their sleeves and get involved in either politics or some organization that is going to affect politics. At the end of the day, it’s our laws and rules that set the terms of our market economy. No company is going to sacrifice profits for the sake of some vision of social good, and indeed, no company has a right to. Investors are not putting their money into a particular company because the company is going to do charitable things with that money.

We — citizens — have to stop expecting corporations to be socially responsible and blaming them for not being so, and we have to have heightened skepticism about corporate claims to be acting in the public interest when all that the companies are seeking is a competitive advantage through politics and public policy.
— Robert Reich

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Social Responsibility

The economy has produced great benefits for consumers and investors in the last thirty years: The Dow Jones has gone from 600 in 1975 to 13,000 today; we have countless TV channels; automakers are producing much better cars; we have many more choices for every kind of product, at lower prices. Capitalism has won. There’s no longer a contest between capitalism and communism.

But inequality is wider than at any time in the last eighty years; jobs are far less stable; the median wage is not much higher than it was in 1980, adjusted for inflation; Main Streets are disappearing; and our planet’s environment is endangered. There are real tradeoffs to the triumph of capitalism.
— Robert Reich

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Capitalism and Economics

If one is to properly understand events and to influence the future, it is essential to master four ways of looking at things: as they were, as they are, as they might become, and [most importantly] as they ought to be..
— Dee Hock

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Future

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.
— Dee Hock

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Success and Wisdom