Quotes About Leadership

If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody's going to get anything done.

It begins with this idea: Your company is a product. Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That's why your company should be your best product.

You can't credibly promote the virtues of reasonable hours, plentiful rest, and a healthy lifestyle to employees if you're doing the opposite as the boss.

The bottom line is that you shouldn't hire people you don't trust, or work for bosses who don't trust you. If you're not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you're held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?

If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone's a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right.

Companies that live in such a zero-sum world don't "earn market share" from a competitor, they "conquer the market." They don't just serve their customers, they "capture" them. They "target" customers, employ a sales "force," hire "headhunters" to find new talent, pick their "battles," and make a "killing.

The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you'll know what it's really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

Companies love to declare "We're all family here." No, you're not.

Bezos only makes decisions in the first half of the day. If any important decision comes to him after noon, he won't make it, he'll say he's waiting until the next day. Because he knows he is cognitively there in the morning, in the best possible way. The mornings are for decisions, the afternoons are not.

Si hubiera hecho caso a mis clientes,  les habría proporcionado un caballo más rápido. HENRY FORD

When you treat people like children, you get children's work. Yet that's exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees.

if you can't let your employees work from home out of fear they'll slack off without your supervision, you're a babysitter, not a manager.

Part of the problem is the perceived need to fill a whole day with management stuff, regardless of whether it's called for or not. All those dreaded status meetings, interruptions for estimates, and planning sessions have a curious way of adding up exactly to a manager's workweek. While monitoring output is sometimes quite important, it's rarely a forty-hour-per-week position. Ten hours maybe, but few full-time managers have the courage to limit their presence to that.

Si lo que quieres es lanzar el «nuevo iPod» o el «sustituto de Pokemon», entonces estás muerto. Estás dejando que sea tu competencia quien determine los parámetros. No serás nunca más Apple que Apple. Ellos definen las reglas del juego. No podrás nunca ganar al que pone las reglas. Tienes que redefinir el juego, y no limitarte a hacer algo un poquito mejor.

Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn't something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them.

As a business owner, you should share everything you know too.

If you still want people in the office every day, change that requirement to every afternoon instead. Then let your troops have their mornings to themselves.

What you do is your legacy. Don't sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see. And don't think it takes a huge team to make that difference either.

Hay algunas palabras que no deberían emplearse nunca en las empresas. Y no nos referimos a mierda o joder. Se trata de imprescindible, obligatorio, imposible, fácil, sencillamente, sólo y rápido. Son rayas rojas que si se cruzan crean malestar, sabotean las discusiones saludables y provocan retrasos en los proyectos.

Defensive companies can't think ahead; they can only think behind. They don't lead; they follow.

The bottom line is that you shouldn't hire people you don't trust, or work for bosses who don't trust you.