“The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.”

“Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”

“Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee - you are a business with one employee, you. Andy Grove, CEO, Intel”

“The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up an listen”

“Remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.”

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.”

“a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. that change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end”

“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”

“While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal”

“we confused the manager’s general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.”

“Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?”

“The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”

“The implication was that either the people in the room needed to change their areas of knowledge and expertise or people themselves needed to be changed”

“To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.”

“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”

“My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.”

“Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.”

“[..] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”

“At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year—and only the next year.”

“if you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself”

“The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and”

“Except for one last thing. What if the people who believe in the cheap Internet appliance turn out to be right?”

“A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence”

“There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.”

“The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”

“Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or “flattened” the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.”

“Adapt or die. Some”

“So in the end careful interviewing doesn’t guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky.”

“We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living.”

“The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.”

“In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry.”

“Don't differentiate without a difference.”

“Electronic banking is still a clumsy way to replace a stamp. And interactive television seems to have vanished even before the ink dried on the mega-announcements.”

“delegation without follow-through is abdication.”

“When people in the company start asking questions like @But how can we say "X" when we do "Y"? more than anything else this is a tip-off that a strategic inflection point may very well be in the making”

“The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.”

“a strong and positive corporate culture is absolutely essential if dual reporting and decision-making by peers are to work.”

“The second idea is that the work of a business, of a government bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams.”

“The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence. The question then becomes, what can managers do to increase the output of their teams? Put another way, what specifically should they be doing during the day when a virtually limitless number of possible tasks calls for their attention? To give you a way to answer the question, I introduce the concept of managerial leverage, which measures the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams. High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.”

“All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.”

“A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.”

“Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. A rise in the latter will obviously lead you to do things to keep inventories from becoming too low.”

“The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).”

“In fact, if indicators are put in place, the competitive spirit engendered frequently has an electrifying effect on the motivation each group brings to its work, along with a parallel improvement in performance.”

“Monitoring the results of delegation resembles the monitoring used in quality assurance. We should apply quality assurance principles and monitor at the lowest-added-value stage of the process. For example, review rough drafts of reports that you have delegated; don’t wait until your subordinates have spent time polishing them into final form before you find out that you have a basic problem with the contents.”

“alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.”

“Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems.”

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.”

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle. It is important to say “no” earlier rather than later because we’ve learned that to wait until something reaches a higher value stage and then abort due to lack of capacity means losing more money and time.”