Quotes from Harvard Business School Press

In one midsize European company, the first pass at a vision contained two-thirds of the basic ideas that were in the final product.

EVERY MAJOR INDUSTRY WAS once a growth industry.

Job-defined markets are generally much larger than product category-defined markets. Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don't understand whom they are competing against from the customer's point of view. Notice

Over the years, 3M has had a policy that at least 25% of its revenue should come from products introduced within the last five years. That encourages small new ventures, which in turn offer hundreds of opportunities to test and stretch young people with leadership potential.

Trying to avoid a thought can make it more active in your brain.

Sometimes we avoid checking in on our progress because we don't want to acknowledge how little progress we've made.

Identifying the right participants It may be easy to default to inviting a crowd of people to a meeting—that way, you don't really have to identify the most critical participants, you'll avoid any

A useful rule of thumb: If you can't communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done

For an example of empathy in action, consider what happened when two giant brokerage companies merged, creating redundant jobs in all their divisions. One division manager called his people together and gave a gloomy speech that emphasized the number of people who would soon be fired. The manager of another division gave his people a different kind of speech. He was up-front about his own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat everyone fairly.

A good mood, incidentally, spreads most swiftly by the judicious use of humor. For

You're scared because you expect a lot from yourself and you're afraid you'll underperform.

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.

But for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people—and only the right people—in the room.

Process Lessons • Tight controls strangle innovation. The planning, budgeting, and reviews applied to existing businesses will squeeze the life out of an innovation effort. • Companies should expect deviations from plan: If employees are rewarded simply for doing what they committed to do, rather than acting as circumstances would suggest, their employers will stifle and drive out innovation.

While loosening formal controls, companies should tighten interpersonal connections between innovation efforts and the rest of the business.

You apply sophisticated information systems and rigorous analysis not only to your core capability but also to a range of functions as varied as marketing and human resources.

Bosses are neither a title on the organization chart nor a "function." They are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.

Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work.

When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business's Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness.

Indeed, our recent research has led us to conclude that one of the most reliable indicators and predictors of true leadership is an individual's ability to find meaning in negative events and to learn from even the most trying circumstances. Put another way, the skills required to conquer adversity and emerge stronger and more committed than ever are the same ones that make for extraordinary leaders.

The danger," he now understands, "is when you think you've got it all figured out.

The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that somehow bridges the hostilities—a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Granted, such an arrangement seems, at first glance, improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation itself.

The art of management is the art of making meaningful generalizations out of inadequate facts.

Our perceptions are shaped not only by what we can do by ourselves but by what we believe we can do with others' help