Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships.
Ross PerotRead
Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.
Interpretation
Effective leadership is essential for managing people, as opposed to simply managing resources.
This quote emphasizes the distinction between managing tangible assets, like inventories, and leading people. While inventories can be organized and controlled with systematic approaches, human beings require inspiration, motivation, and guidance to achieve their best potential. True leadership involves understanding and nurturing the human element in any organization or group.
In practice
In a corporate training session discussing the importance of leadership styles.
Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships.
Never ask anyone to do what you haven't done before and wouldn't do again. That's a pretty fundamental rule in leadership... treat them like you treat yourself. Things you don't like, they don't like.
Don't run your life by what's legal or illegal. Run your life based on what's right or wrong.
Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they're going to make mistakes.
Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility and commitment.
The king shall singly deliberate over secret matters; for ministers have their own ministers, and these latter some of their own; this kind of successive line of ministers tends to the disclosure of counsels.
Most people think of leaders as being these outgoing, very visible, and charismatic people, which I find to be a very narrow perception. The key challenge for managers today is to get beyond the surface of your colleagues. You might just find that you have introverts embedded within your organization who are natural-born leaders.
By blood a king, in heart a clown.
I believe that it is essential to our leadership in the world and to the development of true democracy in our country to have no discrimination in our country whatsoever. This is most important in the schools of our country.
One of the greatest things I fear is letting down my people. I wouldn't live with that type of conscience, of having let down my people after they've been brutalized for so long.
We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies-in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese-or at least manage like them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.