Quotes from Jeffrey Pfeffer

that leaders inspire trust, be authentic, tell the truth, serve others (particularly those who work for and with them), be modest and self-effacing, exhibit empathic understanding and emotional intelligence, and other similar seemingly sensible nostrums.

If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.

Believing that the world is fair, people fail to note the various land mines in the environment that can undermine their careers.

Nortel—another troubled networking company that suffered operating problems as a result of botched mergers.

Condoleezza Rice is right: people will join your side if you have power and are willing to use it, not just because they are afraid of your hurting them but also because they want to be close to your power and success.

One study of relatively highly paid contractors in Silicon Valley found that free agents didn't really feel free because of the need to be always searching for their next gig and therefore frequently took less leisure time than regular employees.

Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger found that the proportion of people working in alternative work arrangements had increased some 50 percent in the ten years from 2005 to 2015. Moreover, "94 percent of the net employment growth in the US economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements."4

The tendency for organizations to place too much value on people who seem smart and who talk a lot, and too little value on people who do smart things and get a lot of things done, is exacerbated by the way that MBAs and executives are taught and by the methods used in most management consulting firms.

lying produces few to no severe sanctions, lying increases in frequency.

lying is then common, it becomes normative, in the sense that norms describe common behavioral patterns. Because lying becomes normative, it isn't sanctioned

73% of companies have decided that lying to their employees about their potential to advance is the right choice.

Planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance

Research by Cornell's Robert Frank and his colleagues showed that the percentage of students choosing unethical options on an honesty test increased dramatically among students taking microeconomics courses, but not among students in astronomy classes.

Lincoln lied about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war. . . .

Moving to something else, whatever else the virtues of that new career path, will rob you of the resources and competence you have built doing what you do.

Take care of your customers, and you will have a successful business. Don't, and you won't. The airlines need to figure this out - soon.