No loss should hit us which can be avoided with constant care.
“No loss should hit us which can be avoided with constant care.”
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
“The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting, so that the big people don’t always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy.”
“Because people are very careful with the secrets of their own business doesn’t mean that they’ll be careful with the secrets of yours.”
“Constant care from everyone, in matters great and small and always, is a necessary condition for the company’s success.”
“The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.”
“Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say yes to one thing you are inevitably saying no to another.”
“Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”
“The difference between a good software person and a great software person is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, huge dynamic range.”
“The most important speed issue is often not technical but cultural. It’s convincing everyone that the company’s survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.”
“Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.”
“Our hiring was always focused on people right out of school. We had a few key hires like Charles Simonyi who came in with experience. But most of our developers, we decided that we wanted them to come with clear minds, not polluted by some other approach, to learn the way that we liked to develop software, and to put the kind of energy into it that we thought was key.”
“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.”
“Remember that by saying yes—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitiy saying no to something else. Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else.”
“If you want to change behaviors, you have to change motivations.”
“If I think something’s a waste of time or inappropriate I don’t wait to point it out. I say it right away. It’s real time. So you might hear me say That’s the dumbest idea I have ever heard many times during a meeting”
“The eye of a master, will do more work than his hand.”
“Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task.”
“In this sense the firm may be described as hoping for performance, while rewarding attendance. What it gets, of course, is attendance.”
“The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.”
“Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.”
“Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked!”
“You had to trust the people you worked with completely or not at all, and you had to make decisions about the trusting.”
“Managers who complain that their workers are not motivated might do well to consider the possibility that they have installed reward systems which are paying off for behaviors other than those they are seeking.”
“Drive thy business, or it will drive thee.”
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
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