Quotes About Performance

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.

plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: "What can my boss do really well?" "What has he done really well?" "What does he need to know to use his strength?" "What does he need to get from me to perform?" He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, "top management." He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.

Introverts do better alone with competition, extraverts do better in large group without competition

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors. They know that it does not matter how many tantrums a prima donna throws as long as she brings in the customers.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a «subject», but a selfdiscipline.

Executives are not paid for doing things they like to do. They are paid for getting the right things done—most of all in their specific task, the making of effective decisions.

True, the number of functional managers should always be kept at a minimum, and there should be the largest possible number of 'general' managers who manage an integrated business and are directly responsible for its performance and results. Even with the utmost application of this principle the great bulk of managers will remain in functional jobs, however. This is particularly true of the younger people. A

control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control

this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.

He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: "What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?" His stress is on responsibility.

while almost every large organization has an appraisal procedure, few of them actually use it.

The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.

It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence