The Best Place to Work Quotes

“Studies indicate that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and provide better client service. They’re less likely to quit or call in sick. What’s more, they act as brand ambassadors outside the office, spreading positive impressions of their company and attracting star performers to their team.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As writer C. S. Lewis once observed, “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Failure, per se, is not enough. The important thing is to mine the failure for insight that can improve your next attempt.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“The secret to happy workplaces isn’t spending more money. It’s about creating the conditions that allow employees to do their best work.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“company culture is not created through mission statements, slogans, or a set of written values. It is a product of leaders’ interactions with their team.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Micromanagement is the motivational equivalent of buying on credit. Enjoy a better product now, but pay a hefty price for it later.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“announcing job openings internally first, so that employees can give the people in their network advance notice.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Your actions echo well beyond the people you know and affect networks of people you may never even meet.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“If you’re surrounded by people who are passionate and inspired, that’s likely to influence your experience.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Grow people’s experience of competence and you’ll inevitably grow their engagement.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“One reason that recognition is vital to doing good work is that it feeds our need for competence. When we receive positive feedback, we experience an emotional rush. Competence is inherently motivating, which is why feeling like you’re good at your job leads you to invest even more of yourself in your work.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“multitasking physical activities is rarely an effective strategy.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“A University of California–Irvine study found that when we’re distracted from an activity in which we are fully immersed, it takes us an average of more than twenty minutes just to regain our previous momentum.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“The more a company’s message is reinforced in a workplace environment, the easier it is for employees to integrate that vision and relay it to the people they meet.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Developing your skills is like waging a negotiation. If the opposition says yes right away, it might mean you’ve aimed too low.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Software development company HCL Technologies takes it one step further by inviting executives to create a Failure CV. To enter the firm’s highly coveted internal leadership program, applicants are required to list some of their biggest career blunders and then explain what they’ve learned from each experience.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Having a team that’s afraid of admitting failure is a dangerous problem, particularly because the symptoms are not immediately visible.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“When your attempt rate is high, each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As British essayist Samuel Johnson once put it, “He who praises everybody praises nobody.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty, because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Unlike in the workplace, there’s also less pressure in a quiet home environment to multitask. While we like to believe that we’re good at multitasking, research suggests it’s rarely an effective strategy. What appears to us as tackling several activities at once often involves simply shuffling between tasks, for which there are serious consequences. When we multitask, our performance suffers, and our stress levels spike. In part, it’s because redirecting our attention from one task to another depletes our cognitive resources, leaving us with less mental energy than if we had simply devoted our full attention to one activity at a time. Researchers are also finding that chronic multitaskers—those of us who can’t help but read e-mails while talking on the phone, for example—are especially prone to experiencing boredom, anxiety, and depression.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Mistakes are the tuition you pay for success.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Having a team that’s afraid of admitting failure is a dangerous problem, particularly because the symptoms are not immediately visible. What appears on the surface to be a well-functioning unit may, in fact, be a group that’s too paralyzed to admit its own flaws. In contrast, teams that freely admit their errors are better able to learn from one another’s mistakes. They can also take steps to prevent repeating those mistakes by tweaking their process. Over the long term, encouraging employees to acknowledge mistakes is therefore a vital first step to seeing improvement.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“When the consequences of reporting failure are too severe, employees avoid acknowledging mistakes altogether. But when a work environment feels psychologically safe and mistakes are viewed as a natural part of the learning process, employees are less prone to covering them up. The fascinating implication is that fearful teams avoid examining the causes of their blunders, making it all the more likely that their mistakes will be repeated again in the future.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Which leads to an interesting conclusion: When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity. And, as we’ll see in this next section, sometimes it can mean the difference between life and death. WHY”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“of the view espoused in most classrooms. From an early age, children are taught that success means having the right answers. That struggling is a bad sign, the sort of thing you do when you’re not quite “getting it,” or the work is too hard. Throughout much of their education, students are encouraged to finish assignments quickly. Those who don’t are sent off to tutors. After twelve years of indoctrination, it’s no wonder that so many of us view failure the way we do: as something to avoid at all cost. We’re implicitly taught that struggling means others will view us poorly, when in reality it’s only by stretching ourselves that we develop new skills. Some educators have begun recognizing the way this fear of failure is impeding their students’ long-term growth. Edward Burger, for one, is doing something about it. For more than a decade the Williams College mathematics professor has literally been rewarding students for failing in his class. “Instead of just touting the importance of failing,”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“What’s odd is that in many ways it’s the precise opposite”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Blakely was taught to interpret failure not as a sign of personal weakness but as an integral part of the learning process. It’s this mind-set that prepared her to endure the risk involved in starting her own business. When coming up short is viewed as the path to learning, when we accept that failure is simply feedback on what we need to work on next, risk-taking becomes a lot easier. Her father’s question taught her an important lesson: If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As far as missteps go, it’s not an inconsequential amount. “Our policy is we try things,” said then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when announcing in 2010 that the company was pulling the plug on Google Wave. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.” Cofounder Larry Page echoed the sentiment. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing that people don’t get.” And in a way, that’s what makes them so prolific. It’s the successful innovators’ dirty little secret: They fail more than the rest of us. SPANX”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As Daniel Coyle points out in The Little Book of Talent, successful athletes don’t just fail during games. They go out of their way to seek out failure during practice. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky, for example, would often fall flat on the ice during skating exercises. It’s not that he’d forgotten how to skate. He was deliberately pushing his boundaries, experimenting with the limits of his ability. When practice is effortless, Coyle argues, learning stops. It’s by walking the precipice between your current abilities and the skills just beyond your reach that growth happens. Master performers don’t get to where they are by playing at the same level day after day. They do so by risking failure and using the feedback to master new skills.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace