Quotes from Harvard Business School Press

if management lets itself drift, it invariably drifts in the direction of thinking of itself as producing goods and services, not customer satisfactions.

The trick in decision making is to avoid becoming either mindlessly global or hopelessly local. If

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success. Originally

At the heart of that activity is innovation: the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise's economic or social potential.

Single male CEOs take bigger financial risks in order to appear more attractive.

what should he do to make strategic planning drive more, better, and faster decisions? Like

Four such areas of opportunity exist within a company or industry: unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, and industry and market changes.

More than anything else, this disconnect—between the way planning works and the way decision making happens—explains the frustration, if not outright antipathy, most executives feel toward strategic planning.

The process contains serious flaws. First, it's conducted annually, so it doesn't help executives respond swiftly to threats and opportunities (a new competitor, a possible acquisition) that crop up throughout the year. Second

Three additional sources of opportunity exist outside a company in its social and intellectual environment: demographic changes, changes in perception, and new knowledge.

they've also changed the nature of top management's discussions about strategy—from "review and approve" to "debate and decide

When technical experts mystify their audiences rather than enlighten them, they lose support—and "no" is always an easier answer than "yes.

use the strategy development process to drive decision making.

Focus on Companywide Issues. During strategy discussions, focus on issues spanning multiple business units. Example:

very few companies (less than 10%, according to our survey) have any sort of rigorous or disciplined process for responding to changes in the external environment.

reading too much useless information makes you 46% less likely to think clearly

Acquisition opportunities tend to emerge spontaneously, the result of changes in management at a target company, the actions of a competitor, or some other unpredictable event.

What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great.

To compete in an aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value.

Because major change requires people across an entire organization to adapt, you as a leader need to resist the reflex reaction of providing people with the answers. Instead, force yourself to transfer, as Roosevelt did, much of the work and problem solving to others. If you don't, real and sustainable change won't occur. In addition, it's risky on a personal level to continue to hold on to the work that should be done by others.

Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.

When told that future promotions will depend to some degree on their ability to nurture leaders, even people who say that leadership cannot be developed somehow find ways to do it.

To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one's own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.

the organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers