Quotes About Progress

They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end.

What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time. My uncle's time. My brother's and my sister's time. My nieces' and my nephews' time. How much time do you want? For your progress.

My progress report concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging.

And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he'll be President of.

The world will change, because it has to change.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

Time is always now. Everybody who has ever thought about his own life knows this. You don't make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you've got to start it now.

There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and the moral change is the only real one.

Burke is a great man by nature, and is expected soon to attain civil greatness. I am grown greater too, for I have maintained the newspapers these many weeks; and what is greater still, I have risen every morning since New-year's day, at about eight; when I was up, I have indeed done but little; yet it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many hours more, the consciousness of being.

Discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the core/stimulate progress.

lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.

technology is important—you can't remain a laggard and hope to be great. But technology by itself is never a primary cause of either greatness or decline.

Greatness is an inherently dynamic process, not an end point. The moment you think of yourself as great, your slide toward mediocrity will have already begun.

The good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.

Far more difficult than implementing change is figuring out what works, understanding why it works, grasping when to change, and knowing when not to.

As people decide among themselves to turn the fact of potential into the fact of results, the goal almost sets itself.

It's hard to see the difference between greatness and mediocrity in good times, when almost everyone is thriving. But when the turbulent times come, the difference becomes stark; the companies that exercised productive paranoia far in advance will pull ahead of the weak mediocrities. And even if the ill-prepared survive the disruptive shock, they will likely never close the gap. The strong and well prepared before the storm continue to pull ahead, never to look back.

Do all creative innovations come from weird people? No, of course not. In fact, some of the most creative people we know come in fairly conservative packages. Yet, to have an innovative company, it's also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.

The same thing happens in business. When people become fat with conventional wisdom, they're dangerous. A lot of being innovative in business is being willing to give something a try because you don't know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. As Debi Colman, Apple VP of information systems and technology, puts it: "The single biggest roadblock to creativity and innovation I've encountered in business is conventional wisdom.

Creating alignment, which is a key part of our ongoing work to help companies transform themselves into visionary companies, requires two key processes: 1) developing new alignments to preserve the core and stimulate progress, and 2) eliminating misalignments—those that drive the company away from the core ideology and those that impede progress toward the envisioned future.

Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out.

those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity.