Quotes About Organization

they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.

Core ideology provides the glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and develops workplace diversity. Think of it as analogous to the principles of Judaism that held the Jewish people together for centuries without a homeland, even as they spread throughout the Diaspora.

The key point of this chapter is not just the idea of getting the right people on the team. The key point is that "who" questions come before "what" decisions—before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. First who, then what—as a rigorous discipline, consistently applied.

2. Core purpose is an organization's most fundamental reason for being. It should not be confused with the company's current product lines or customer segments. Rather, it reflects people's idealistic motivations for doing the company's work. Disney's core purpose is to make people happy—not to build theme parks and make cartoons. An

It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place.

serving a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point is the fundamental importance of unit leadership. The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn't amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level.

The main point is to first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The

Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values.

The task before you is not to be a single charismatic individual with vision. The task is to build an organization with vision. Individuals die; great companies can live for centuries.

Do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done. Peter F. Drucker

One powerful method for getting at purpose is the five whys. Start with the descriptive statement We make X products or We deliver X services, and then ask, Why is that important? five times. After a few whys, you'll find that you're getting down to the fundamental purpose of the organization. We

If you must have more than one priority, then keep it to a maximum of three—any more than three priorities is an admission that you don't really have any priorities.

the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline—a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

Kenneth Atchity, president of Atchity Entertainment International, observed that there is a vital difference between managing time and managing work: work is infinite; time is finite. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. To be productive, therefore, you must manage your time, not your work. The key question to ask yourself is not "What am I going to do?" but "How am I going to spend my time?

Setting priorities requires making tough choices as to what is really important. One reason so many people have such a difficult time getting focused is that they also have a difficult time making decisions: they balk at choosing which items will be left off their priority list.

Most companies (we believe that most organizations do indeed lack clarity of vision) let crises, firefights, and tactical decisions drive the company. We refer to this as "tactics-driving strategy." Vision should drive strategy and strategy, in turn, should drive tactics, not the other way around.

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

The point is not to create a perfect statement but to gain a deep understanding of your organization's core values and purpose, which can then be expressed in a multitude of ways. In fact, we often suggest that once the core has been identified, managers should generate their own statements of the core values and purpose to share with their groups.

Whereas the good-to-great companies had Level 5 leaders who built an enduring culture of discipline, the unsustained comparisons had Level 4 leaders who personally disciplined the organization through sheer force.

In the early phases of an organization, a company's vision comes directly from its early leaders; it is very much their personal vision. To become great, however, a company must progress past excessive dependence on one or a few key individuals. The vision must become shared as a community, and become identified primarily with the organization, rather than with certain individuals running the organization. The vision must actually transcend the founders.

his mind docketing the important things for future transcription.

The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty.