Quotes from David Cote

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either. In particular, be sure to get people past the mentality of "I have to do my job and this too?

Finding and Fixing the "Hidden Factory" 1.?Map out your existing process step by step from beginning to end. 2.?Map common workarounds in case of problems. 3.?Optimize your process and involve end users. 4.?Confirm that the new processes are more efficient and improve results for end users.

We created a corporate handbook that each business unit had to follow when performing due diligence on a potential acquisition.

An organization that is adept at constantly evolving usually won't need to take enormous risks to bring about revolutionary change, because it'll have been changing all along.

Overall, the handbook focused us on trying to disprove our assumptions about a business and thus avoid falling into the trap of confirmation bias.

Too many leaders expect their people to adapt to their particular leadership style. If you want the best performance, look beyond your style and provide feedback tailored to the individual.

Criticizing privately might be appropriate in certain, sensitive cases, but in general both criticism and praise should be public. Your people have to understand that certain behaviors or performance are unacceptable. Otherwise they'll wonder why the organization allows it. When leaders share both criticism and praise publicly, team members learn about the high performance culture you're striving to create.

When it came to monetary compensation, we didn't hesitate to pay our leaders above market.

To attract and retain the very best, we also paid the best people what they would command at other companies for a bigger job. Why wait until someone else tried to steal them away before paying them what the market said they were worth?

My interviews also imparted a sense to the interviewees of how significant the new job was to the company. When the CEO and global HR leader each take an hour to talk to you about a job you're interviewing for, that says something

If you have a great strategy but overpay for a company, someone else's shareholders will see the benefits of your strategy, not yours.

Show some courage—be the leader you want to be. Without legacy issues hanging over your head, you'll be able to focus on building up your business to compete better and win, and you'll channel the money you save by resolving issues proactively back into the business. You won't reap all of the financial benefits—your successors will inherit them as well. What you will reap is a legacy; a reputation as a strong, transformational leader.

more leaders equals more bureaucracy. Leaders don't just lead—they create work for other people, in the form of meetings, sign-offs, projects, procedures, priorities, and so on, especially if they're good leaders. Others in the organization then spend more of their time responding to these leaders and less time leading or managing their own team members. Each leader has their own staff—adding yet more cost and complexity to the organization.

When you ask leaders to do more, and they deliver over both the short and long term, leading to wins for shareholders and customers, then those leaders deserve higher than average compensation.

Bob Rubin's book In an Uncertain World. Rubin had argued that many outcomes are possible in a given situation, and you have to anticipate and prepare for eventualities that seem unlikely but that could prove extremely damaging should they materialize

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either.

let's discuss the purpose of this presentation. If we're here for the team to put on a show for me, then you're right, I should sit back and listen. But if the point is for me to learn about your business and its issues, then we need to conduct the presentation in a way that facilitates my learning. I need to ask questions right away, get the answers I need, and then move on.

Instead of finding new ways to support innovation and investment while achieving short-term goals, they fall back on the same old strategies, policies, and procedures, relying on accounting sleight-of-hand to make it all work.

Great leaders, I came to believe, challenge themselves and others to understand their businesses better and rethink them so that they can achieve two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. That same intellectual discipline—that mind-set of rigor and curiosity—allows leaders to master what is arguably the most important conflict of all: attaining strong short-term results while also investing in the future to achieve great long-term results.

After hearing our presentation, audience members would raise their hands and ask, "So, what was the single big thing you did to achieve these great results?" "Well," I said, "there was no single best practice. It was a mind-set of intellectual rigor we had adopted that made the difference. It's this mind-set that you should be striving to replicate in your own organization.

My first and most enduring challenge as CEO was to dramatically improve the quality of both our individual thinking and our group discussions.

leadership boils down to three distinct tasks. First, leaders must know how to mobilize a large group of people. Second, they must pick the right direction toward which their team or organization should move. And third, they must get the entire team or organization moving in that direction to execute against that designated goal.

In truth, mobilizing people is only about 5 percent of the leader's job. The best leaders dedicate almost all their time to the latter two elements: making great decisions and executing consistently with those decisions.

In challenging other leaders intellectually, I strove specifically to push them beyond the incrementalism that usually exists inside organizations—the tendency to consider the short-term implications of a decision exclusively and to ignore the long term.