Great Throughts Treasury

"Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. "

"Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands."

"Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the naturals, the ones who somehow know how to teach."

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. "

"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. "

"The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under."

"The best way to predict the future is to create it. "

"The computer is a moron. "

"The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. "

"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said. "

"The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society. "

"The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results. "

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say I. And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say I. They don't think I. They think we; they think team. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but we get the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done. "

"The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product."

"The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions. "

"The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different."

"The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications."

"The non-profit institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its product is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their product is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether. "

"The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager."

"The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves. "

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. "

"The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question. "

"There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job. "

"There is the risk you cannot afford to take; there is the risk you cannot afford not to take. "

"The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission. "

"This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. "

"Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed. "

"We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. "

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."

"We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it. "

"We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information."

"What's measured improves. "

"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission. "

"Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. "

"When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. "

"What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter. "

"Commitment in the face of conflict produces character. "

"Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you. "

"Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past."

"Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration."

"Decision making is the specific executive task."

"Education can no longer be the sole property of the state."

"During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value."

"Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen."

"Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities."

"Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'"

"Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."

"It pays to plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark. "

"Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time."

"If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason."