Management Quotes

The abiding, distinctive feature of all crashes, whether in stock prices, housing values, or hit-TV-show ratings, is that they startle but don’t surprise. When the euphoria subsides, when the volatile graph lines of excitability flatten and then curve down, people realize, collectively and instantly (and not infrequently with some relief), that they’ve been expecting this correction. The signs were everywhere, the warnings clear, the researchers in rough agreement, and the stories down at the bar and in the office (our own stories included) revealed the same anxieties.

Which explains why the busts and reversals we deem inevitable are also the least preventable, and why they startle us, if briefly, when they come—because they were inevitable for so long that they should have come already. That they haven’t, we reason, can mean only one of two things. Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle of dream-and-make-it-happen. Either that, or the thing that went up and up and up and hasn’t come down, though it should have long ago, is being held aloft by our decision to forget it’s up there and to carry on as though it weren’t.
— Walter Kirn

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics

Unfortunately, most leadership “recipes” arise from examples of good crisis management. This is a mistake, and not only because chaotic situations are mercifully rare…Indeed, a specific danger for leaders following a crisis is that some of them become less successful when the context shifts because they are not able to switch styles to match it.

Moreover, leaders who are highly successful in chaotic contexts can develop an overinflated self-image, becoming legends in their own minds. When they generate cultlike adoration, leading actually becomes harder for them because a circle of admiring supporters cuts them off from accurate information.

Yet the chaotic domain is nearly always the best place for leaders to impel innovation. People are more open to novelty and directive leadership in these situations than they would be in other contexts. One excellent technique is to manage chaos and innovation in parallel: The minute you encounter a crisis, appoint a reliable manager or crisis management team to resolve the issue. At the same time, pick out a separate team and focus its members on the opportunities for doing things differently. If you wait until the crisis is over, the chance will be gone.
— David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Crisis Management and Leadership

If you are really serious about creating innovative options, you couldn’t do better than to turn to Buddhist thinking. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki describes the Zen mind as one that is open, allowing for both doubt and possibility, and one that has the ability to see things as fresh and new. As he observed, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

We also advocate adopting a protégé. While it’s widely known that being a protégé benefits rising executives, an ongoing stream of research reveals that the person who often gets the most value from a mentoring relationship is the mentor, who is exposed to information, queries, and ideas from which she may otherwise be too remote.
— Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Innovation and Personal Development and Thought

For executives trying to make sense of a rapidly changing business environment, superiority in pattern recognition is perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that can be developed.
— Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Personal Development and Skills and Strategy

Ambitious people don’t like failing or looking stupid. As the social scientist Chris Argyris (one of the fathers of organizational-learning theory) put it, smart people have trouble learning because it involves so much floundering and failure.
— Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Ambition and Learning and Personality / Behavior and Success

Most of a leader’s important calls reside in one of three domains: people, strategy, or crisis. People judgments—getting the right people on your team and developing up-and-comers who themselves demonstrate good judgment—are foundational. The people around you help you make good strategy judgment calls and the best decisions during the occasional but inevitable crisis. It’s sometimes possible to repair the damage—to a company or a career—that results from misjudgments about strategy or crises, but it is almost impossible to recover from poor people judgment.
— Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources and Judgement and Leadership

I think most big errors are errors of omission rather than errors of commission. They are the ones that companies never get held to account for—the times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it, had the skills and competencies or could have acquired them, and yet failed to do so. It’s the opposite of sticking to your knitting: It’s when you shouldn’t have stuck to your knitting but you did.
— Jeff Bezos

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Failure and Judgement and Management and Strategy

A lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build these customer-focused strategies. And actually I do think they work better in fast-changing environments, for two reasons. First, customer needs change more slowly—assuming you pick the right ones—than a lot of other things. Second, close following doesn’t work as well in a fast-changing environment. The strategic value of close following is in not having to go down all the blind alleys. You let smaller competitors check those out, and when they find something good, you just quadruple down. If you’re following close enough, and the arena is slow-moving enough, the fact that you’re not first down that path doesn’t hurt you much.
— Jeff Bezos

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Customer Related and Strategy

It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now. Whereas if you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things—who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available, and so on—those things are going to change so rapidly that you’re going to have to change your strategy very rapidly, too.
— Jeff Bezos

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Strategy

The most effective way people can change a story is to view it through any of three new lenses, which are all alternatives to seeing the world from the victim perspective. With the reverse lens, for example, people ask themselves, “What would the other person in this conflict say and in what ways might that be true?” With the long lens they ask, “How will I most likely view this situation in six months?” With the wide lens they ask themselves, “Regardless of the outcome of this issue, how can I grow and learn from it?” Each of these lenses can help people intentionally cultivate more positive emotions.
— Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Decision and Storytelling and Thought