Quotes About Organization

Minute-to-minute and day-to-day you don't have time to think. You need to have already thought.

Projects do not need to be listed in any particular order, whether by size or by priority. They just need to be on a master list

For many of your projects, you will accumulate relevant information that you will want to organize by theme or topic or project name. Your "Projects" list will be merely an index. All of the details, plans, and supporting information that you may need as you work on your various projects should be contained in separate file folders, computer files, notebooks, or binders.

There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done.

If your head is your only system for placeholding, you will experience an attempted multitasking internally, which is psychologically impossible and the source of much stress for many people.

you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.

The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments.

The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get things done. Appropriate action management lets you feel comfortable and in control as you move through your broad spectrum of work and life, while appropriate project focusing gets you clear about and on track with the specifics needed.

Three things go on your calendar: • time-specific actions; • day-specific actions; and • day-specific information.

What you've probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar, though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what you need to organize. And daily to-do lists and simplified priority coding have proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average professional's workload.

Success or failure was always defined largely during the preparation. With good planning all one had to do was execute. Even last-second changes could be made with greater ease if the planning in the first place had been precise.

Pine was normally a light packer, a one-suitcase sort of girl. But for this trip, she had brought a second small suitcase. She set it on her bed and opened it. She looked down at the oddball assortment of items carefully packed inside

Einheiten zu planen. Sein Leben war sehr strukturiert, bot

Unlike water, which prefers to lie flat as it accumulates, material wealth in complex societies likes to pile itself up into huge pyramids.

Most companies have succession plans for their leadership ranks, but it devolves into a rote exercise, and the organization lacks a clear sense of who will fill key roles in case of departure. It's another instance of what I call "compliance with words rather than compliance with intent.

Just as you're pushing for more efficiency throughout the organization via process change, you can also keep your organization increasingly slender and nimble as you grow by maintaining a leadership corps that is relatively small and stable but that punches far above its weight.

Companies that step up to repair the harm they've caused and prevent new harm from occurring have a much easier time attracting top talent to their doors. It's probably going to be cheaper for your organization to resolve your legacy issues now than it will be a decade from now, when the harm will have mounted even more.

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

we made a practice of publicizing internally the top ten and bottom ten performers on HOS. Leaders and teams liked placing in the top ten, but they absolutely detested being publicly identified as a bottom-ten performer. This tactic helped generate a sense of urgency around HOS, raising performance across the entire organization. In fact, I recommend using this tactic whenever you're trying to change anything in an organization.

When both introducing and sustaining change, leadership matters. The organization needs to see that you, personally, are taking this seriously. As we rolled out HOS, I talked about its importance for our business at every opportunity. I held regular meetings to make sure we were actually implementing it and that we were getting the results—something I didn't do for Six Sigma, and a reason it underdelivered.

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.

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.

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.

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.