Quotes About Success

It might be asked, are all these policies and practices necessary? Don't they interfere with the entrepreneurial spirit and stifle creativity? And cannot a business be entrepreneurial without such policies and practices? The answer is, perhaps, but neither very successfully nor for very long.

Far more often, the unexpected success is simply not seen at all. Nobody pays any attention to it. Hence, nobody exploits it, with the inevitable result that the competitor runs with it and reaps the rewards.

To exploit the opportunity for innovation offered by unexpected success requires analysis. Unexpected success is a symptom. But a symptom of what? The underlying phenomenon may be nothing more than a limitation on our own vision, knowledge, and understanding.

Managements must look at every unexpected success with the questions: (1) What would it mean to us if we exploited it? (2) Where could it lead us? (3) What would we have to do to convert it into an opportunity? And (4) How do we go about it? This means, first, that managements need to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes; and second, that someone should always be designated to analyse an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited.

I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery.

Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems. Only the fairy tale ends, "They lived happily ever after.

The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive.

The unexpected success is an opportunity, but it makes demands. It demands to be taken seriously. It demands to be staffed with the ablest people available, rather than with whoever we can spare. It demands seriousness and support on the part of management equal to the size of the opportunity. And the opportunity is considerable.

And productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.

Nothing succeeds like concentration on the right business. And if the company is not in the right business, diversification will no more make it a "growth company," than a man with a broken hip will be restored to health, by being taken on a twenty-mile forced march with an eighty-pound pack on his shoulders.

He knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.

And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question." He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: "The question is: how to be useful!" A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.

Note that the question is not "What do I want to do?" Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

Effective executives build on strengths

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.

Write an Action Plan

Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.

We cannot yet develop a theory of innovation. But we already know enough to say when, where, and how one looks systematically for innovative opportunities, and how one judges the chances for their success or the risks of their failure. We know enough to develop, though still only in outline form, the practice of innovation.

Exploiting opportunities produces results.

But the order in which these sources will be discussed is not arbitrary. They are listed in descending order of reliability and predictability. For, contrary to almost universal belief, new knowledge – and especially new scientific knowledge – is not the most reliable or most predictable source of successful innovations. For all the visibility, glamour, and importance of science-based innovation, it is actually the least reliable and least predictable one.

No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success. In no other area are innovative opportunities less risky and their pursuit less arduous. Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.

We need far too many leaders to depend only on the naturals.

The question to ask is not "What is top management?" The question is "What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?

One reason why it is difficult for management to accept unexpected success is that all of us tend to believe that anything that has lasted a fair amount of time must be 'normal' and go on 'forever'. Anything that contradicts what we have come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound, unhealthy, and obviously abnormal.