Management by numerical goal is an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do, and in fact is usually management by fear.

William Edwards Deming

Good people are not just crucial to a business, they are the business!

Richard Branson

Corporate culture is what employees do when they know nobody's looking.

Bob Diamond

You can take my factories, burn up my buildings, but give me my people and I'll build the business right back again.

Henry Ford

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

Theodore Levitt

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

William Edwards Deming

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.

Albert Schweitzer

In any large organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way... do not complain about illogical behavior...

Eliyahu Goldratt

If strategy is everything, maybe it is nothing.

Henry Mintzberg

The golden rule for every business man is this: "Put yourself in your customer's place."

Orison Swett Marden

Aim and method are essential. An aim without a method is useless. A method without an aim is dangerous. It leads to action without direction and without constancy of purpose.

William Edwards Deming

A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system.

William Edwards Deming

Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.

Og Mandino

Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

George S. Patton

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

Albert Schweitzer

It's not what you are that holds you back, it's what you think you are not.

Denis Waitley

Being an innovator is not just about solving problems - its about solving problems no one else sees

Phil Mckinney

Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought?.

Henri L. Bergson

It took all of our learning, our best thinking - to realize something so simple, so clear and yet so truly extraordinary.

Jonathan Ives

Picasso had a saying. He said 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. ... I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Steve Jobs

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

Donald Rumsfeld

There are three secrets to managing.The first secret is have patience. The second is be patient. And the third is patience.

Chuck Tanner

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.

Irving Berlin

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

Steve Job

The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.

Agha Hasan Abedi

Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.

Henry Mintzberg

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

J. Paul Getty

I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.

Charles Maurice

You can't think your way out of a box; you've got to act.

Tom Peters

You get the best efforts from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within.

Bob Nelson

The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it.

Guy Kawasaki

There are three secrets to managing.The first secret is have patience.The second is be patient. And the third is patience.

Chuck Tanner

Managers will try anything easy that doesn’t work before they will try anything hard that does work.

Jim Womack

Most organizations staff their problems and starve their opportunities.

Peter Drucker

I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.

Lord Acton

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer...

Peter Drucker

We will win and you will lose. You cannot do anything because your failure is an internal disease. Your companies are based on Taylor’s principles. Worse, your heads are Taylorized too. You firmly believe that sound management means executives on the one side and workers on the other, on the one side men who think and on the other side men who only work.

Konusuke Matsushita

Kanban is like the milkman. Mom didn’t give the milkman a schedule. Mom didn’t use MRP. She simply put the empties on the front steps and the milkman replenished them. That is the essence of a pull system.

Ernie Smith

I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Immanuel Kant

An hour saved at the non-bottleneck is a mirage.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

Theodore Roosevelt

If we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Make the bottlenecks work only on what will contribute to throughput today … not nine months from now. That’s one way to increase capacity at the bottlenecks. The other way you increase bottleneck capacity is to take some of the load off the bottlenecks and give it to non-bottlenecks.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Trust men and they will be true to you: treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat?  The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity.  People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’.

Taiichi Ohno

The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff.

Roger Enrico

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.

Larry Bossidy

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi