The 100 Best Business Books of All Time What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
It’s the writer sitting at her keyboard while the story writes itself. In those moments, we have experienced what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, when we are totally focused and completely un-self-conscious. This achievement of flow captures that longed-for state of happiness.
Flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
Tags: #flow
“Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time,”
“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”
THE SEVEN HABITS 1. Be Proactive 2. Begin with the End in Mind 3. Put First Things First 4. Think Win/Win 5. Seek First to Understand … Then to Be Understood 6. Synergize 7. Sharpen the Saw
Covey believes we all have four dimensions that need continual renewal: the physical, the mental, the spiritual, and the social/emotional. He suggests spending an hour working on the first three every day. Find time for a cardiovascular workout. Read the classics. Keep a journal. Meditate or pray. It is only through recharging that we have the energies to succeed in the other aspects of our lives.
“Always make the other person feel important.”
“I used to say that networking is the most underrated management skill. Now I believe it may be the most important management skill, bar none.”
Tags: #humans
“I define intuition as the way we translate our experience into action.”
M]ore leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.”
Leadership is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice persuasive, the results tangible.
“Leadership is not a gene and it’s not an inheritance. Leadership is an identifiable set of skills and abilities that are available to all of us.”
Tags: #leadership
“Understanding and accepting diversity enables us to see that each of us is needed.”
Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.’”
“Values are meaningless without stories to bring them to life and engage us on a personal level.”
- A Bias for Action 2. Stay Close to the Customer 3. Autonomy and Entrepreneurship 4. Productivity through People 5. Hands-On, Value Driven 6. Stick to the Knitting 7. Simple Form, Lean Staff 8. Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties
“In observing the excellent companies, and specifically the way they interact with customers, what we found most striking was the consistent presence of obsession. This characteristically occurred as a seemingly unjustifiable overcommitment to some form of quality, reliability, or service.”
The Hedgehog Concept sits at the center of three intersecting circles: 1. What you can be best in the world at 2. What drives your economic engine 3. What you are deeply passionate about
“To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.”
“Managing, especially managing through a crisis, is an extremely personal affair.”
Tags: #management
“Strong leaders in robust markets epitomize the epithet of Sun Tzu: ‘The more opportunities I seize, the more opportunities multiply before me.’”
“The central fact of service marketing is this frustrating one: It is much easier to fail in a service than to succeed.”
“The quickest route to a zag is to look at what competitors do, then do something different. No—REALLY different.”
“The chasm phenomenon … drives all emerging high-tech enterprises to a point of crisis where they must leave the relative safety of their established early market and go out in search of a new home in the mainstream.”
“The prospect is persuaded more by the depth of your conviction than he is by the height of your logic.”
“[T]he paramount job of every single employee in an organization is to, directly or indirectly, get and keep customers.”
“Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.”
“People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.”
“Business management must always, in every decision and action, put economic performance first.”
“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”
“Improvement of quality transfers waste of man-hours and of machinetime into the manufacture of good product and better service.”
“Industrial society must develop the courage, or rather the common sense, to procure only what is needed when it is needed and in the amount needed.”
“The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the financial outcome, good or bad.”
- Business is a team sport—choose games that build a team. 2. Be positive, build confidence. 3. Celebrate every win. 4. It’s got to be a game. 5. Give everyone the same set of goals. 6. Don’t use goals to tell people everything you want them to do.
“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
“The biggest enemy of thinking is complexity, for that leads to confusion.”
“It is better to aim at perfection and miss it than it is to aim at imperfection and hit it.”
“Working in a start-up isn’t easy… . Therefore, belief in what you’re doing is as important as competence and experience.”
“[Y]our business is a means rather than an end, a vehicle to enrich your life rather than one that drains the life you have.”
“Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact.”
“[I]t’s the romance, not the finance that makes business worth pursuing,”
“No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, our financial success is ultimately dependent on circumstances outside our control.”
“In truth, The Monk is not primarily a business book; that is, it is not about buying low and selling high, but rather about creating a life while making a living. It is about the need to fashion a meaningful existence that engages you in the time and place in which you find yourself. It is about the purpose of work and the integration of what one does with what one believes. The Monk is not about how, but about why.”
“A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.”
A] good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.”
“Applying algorithms to creativity is like biochemists trying to formulate the chemistry of love. It takes some of the romance out of the enterprise.”