Quotes from Jason Jennings

Arrow doesn't allow that kind of "home office knows best" bureaucracy that kills momentum. "The people that run a business really know that business. We execute better because we push activities and decisions down to them," Long explains. "I believe our success is because the people we acquired in the deal all feel they are a part of it.

successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

It was an unexpected conclusion that rocked the Harvard research team. "Well-led teams have higher error rates than average or poorly led teams," the researchers concluded. Harvard was studying acute-care hospitals and other settings, including executive boardrooms. The results were consistent: Teams led by the best leaders made significantly more mistakes.

awake at night?" The response is practically unanimous: Leaders worry about creating a sense of urgency in their organizations and operating quickly in an increasingly complex world. They want to create strong teams that are primed to handle any hurdle that comes their way and

Jugaad started as the Hindi word for an ultracheap vehicle first fashioned by rural Punjabi carpenters. Having nothing but empty pockets and a problem to solve, the local craftsmen took an old diesel irrigation pump, attached it to a wooden frame, and added wheels and the discarded steering system from a broken-down jeep. They called this jalopy "jugaad," roughly translated as "using few resources and a lot of determination to find an innovative solution to a problem.

Poorly led teams "systematically underreported" their mistakes. In layman's terms, they covered up their mistakes.

KISS A LOT OF FROGS "The successful don't start with brilliant ideas … they discover them!" —Peter Sims, best-selling author and venture capitalist

If it ain't broke, don't fix it," when he added that those words are, in Powell's perspective, "a slogan for the complacent, the arrogant, or the scared." How can such a commonsense maxim be so insidious and disastrous? It's because of an immutable law of business: By the time you figure out it's broke, it's been broke for a very long time.

There are two ways to run a big company: by rules or by values,

In the early days of IBM, when a newly promoted executive lost a lot of money on a bet that went wrong, founder Thomas Watson let everyone know he wasn't going to be fired. "Why would I fire him?" he asked. "We just spent thirty thousand dollars educating him.

Until people are able to figure out how to deal with the natural tendency to hesitate and drag their feet because of their fear of the unknown, no meaningful reinvention will occur.

Decisions about who goes and who stays, who leads and who follows will determine any enterprise's ability to embrace constant change, growth, and reinvention.

People aren't your most important resource—the right people are your only resource.

The right people are those who take the initiative to get things done, who make things happen and whom you come to count on for ideas for constant change and improvement.

We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.

But basic smarts are just half of the necessary mind-set. The second half is the ability to learn new things, something a surprising number of people find incredibly difficult.

It's not the sense of entitlement shared by spoiled rich kids. Instead it's the misguided and arrogant belief shared by so many business owners and executives that their business has a right to continue to exist and do well simply by virtue of either being in business or having been successful at some point.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: "Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

When confronted with problems, most companies try to make small changes or Band-Aid fixes and hope things get better or that the problem goes away. This approach doesn't work and ensures that they'll waste vast amounts of time and energy.

The most natural action of a senior official is to breed junior officials.

CEOs and senior leaders who are thinking about leaving a company have effectively already left, and the biggest favor they can do the organization is to get out of the way and allow the business to change and grow.

Having a good work ethic means taking the initiative to get the job done, delivering as agreed without excuses or blame, being willing to make personal sacrifice for the good of the organization, and being loyal to the company and people with whom you work.

A shared human condition is the desire to leave an organization on an even keel, with everyone sharing fond memories. Those desires are hardly the things that make risk taking, radical change, and reinvention possible.

When you hire someone with a strong work ethic, who shares your values and fits your culture, you don't need a lot of rules or bureaucracy," he says. "All the rules you find inside most companies are there for the two percent of all people who don't do the right thing, and in the process of having rules for them they adversely affect the other ninety-eight percent of all people who don't need rules. It's a lot easier to not hire those two percent.