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plans always remain on paper, always remain good intentions. They seldom turn into achievement.
Man is ill-equipped to manage his time.
Mixing personal relations and work relations is time-consuming. If hurried, it turns into friction.
a high standard of living presupposes an economy of innovation and change. But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive.
Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts at managing time can prevent drifting.
A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine that clerks can manage.
The recurrent crisis is not confined to the lower levels of an organization. It afflicts everyone.
Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization.
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
Unless a decision has “degenerated into work,” it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.
The trouble with miracles is not, after all, that they happen rarely; it is that one cannot rely on them.
It is fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke resistance.
One gains nothing, in other words, by starting out with the question, What is acceptable?
All a computer can handle are abstractions. And abstractions can be relied on only if they are constantly checked against the concrete. Otherwise, they are certain to mislead us.
executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.
no one has ever failed to find the facts he is looking for.
He insists that people who voice an opinion also take responsibility for defining what factual findings can be expected and should be looked for.
Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination.
Imagination needs to be challenged and stimulated, however, or else it remains latent and unused.
Knowledge workers are not paid for doing things they like to do. They are paid for getting the right things done—most of all in their specific task, the making of effective decisions.
The ability to make effective decisions increasingly determines the ability of every knowledge worker, at least of those in responsible positions, to be effective altogether.
We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see largely what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear.
Even the Lord, the Bible reports, first had to strike Saul blind before he could raise him up as Paul. Communications aiming at conversion demand surrender.
Where communication is perception, information is logic.
Communications, in other words, may not be dependent on information. Indeed, the most perfect communications may be purely “shared experiences,” without any logic whatever. Perception has primacy rather than information.
History knows no more charismatic leaders than this century’s triad of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—the misleaders who inflicted as much evil and suffering on humanity as have ever been recorded.
charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
effective leaders are painfully aware that they are not in control of the universe. (Only misleaders—the Stalins, Hitlers, Maos—suffer from that delusion.)
The leader’s first task is to be the trumpet that sounds a clear sound.
the leader see leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.
the gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies, as happened in Russia the moment Stalin died and as happens all too often in companies.
The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.
There is no known way to teach someone how to be a genius.
The purposeful innovation resulting from analysis, system, and hard work is all that can be discussed and presented as the practice of innovation. But this is all that need be presented since it surely covers at least 90 percent of all effective innovations.
Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. The second imperative of innovation is therefore to go out to look, to ask, to listen.
Successful innovators use both the right side and the left side of their brains.
All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say, “This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?”
Grandiose ideas, plans that aim at “revolutionizing an industry,” are unlikely to work.
Incompetence, after all, is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply.
don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!
unless there is an immediate application in the present, an innovation is like the drawings in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook—a “brilliant idea.”
The innovators I know are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.
Successful innovators are conservative. They have to be. They are not “risk-focused”; they are “opportunity-focused.”
For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life?
forty or fifty years in the same kind of work is much too long for most people. They deteriorate, get bored, lose all joy in their work, “retire on the job,” and become a burden to themselves and to everyone around them.
knowledge workers are not “finished.” They are perfectly capable of functioning
Three Answers for the Second Half of Life There are three answers. The first is actually to start a second and different career
The second answer to the question of what to do with the second half of one’s life is to develop a parallel career.
the third answer—there are the “social entrepreneurs.”
There is one requirement for managing the second half of one’s life: to begin creating it long before one enters it.
