There has to be a way to redirect employee’s driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.
Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.
In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.
…every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.
Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.
In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.
Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don’t change that much.Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.
Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.
The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.
The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom.
Passion isn’t something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you’re actually doing every day.
You won’t find a CEO who doesn’t talk about a ‘powerful culture’ as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.
Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization – but only when they fall on fertile ground.
I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I’ll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I’m afraid that I’ll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.
It’s a special person – and personality – who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.