In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
--Yogi Berra
At age 21, I was blessed with a great mentor, legendary Harvard Business Review, Ernie Frawley. He continually listened to what I was trying to do, advised me on when I needed to make a shift, and encouraged me to take on new challenges. As a result, I found out a lot about business that I...
Improvisation is too good to be left to chance.
--Paul Simon
Improvisation is essential because it keeps you focused on trying to accomplish something rather than being distracted by hurdles and challenges. Let me explain more.
My childhood experiences made me confident that I could find opportunities where others saw none. And that confidence has always been rewarded. It's no wonder...
Don't condescend to unskilled labor.
Try it for a half a day first.
--Anonymous
My dad had very little formal education. He was the oldest boy in a large farm family that rented poor quality land, and his dad wanted him working in the fields and the barn rather than sitting in school. Since grandpa was on the school board, he was able to interfere with dad's education. By the end of...
Do you work mainly to earn a living? Or do you love what you do so much you would do it for no pay?
If you just work to earn a living, how would your life be different if you loved your work instead?
I used to meet with a group of entrepreneurs who advised one another on how to be more successful. Once a year, our coordinator would ask us to spend two days away from the office to consider...
When I was growing up in California, I liked to go to the fun house at Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica. There was a house of glass, and it was a maze that was hard to get through. People who felt around to find the glass did better than those who simply blundered forward in whatever direction they had been going.
If you did it often enough, you learned to look down at the floor. Near the...
We always carry out by committee anything in which
any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.
--Frank Moore Colby
I had the good fortune to work with Peter Drucker for many years in helping to sharpen my focus on creating tomorrow's best management practices. Let me share with you what I learned and encourage you to seek similar stimulation.
By early 1995, Carol Coles and...
The future belongs to those who
believe in the beauty of their dreams.
--Eleanor Roosevelt
Another of the big hurdles to making improvements is found in the bee analogy: Many people limit themselves to that concept of having a bee bring some pollen from another flower to improve a person or organization with some added attribute. The purpose of such pollen spreading is seen as...
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
--Mark Twain
After I joined Heublein as the corporate planner, our CEO once told me I should spend 5 percent of my time adding new knowledge that would be useful to the company. This knowledge searching seemed like a perfect opportunity to study how the past might provide clues for creating future improvements.
I found a seminar...
You see things; and you say why?
But I dream things that never were; and
I say "why not?"
--George Bernard Shaw
Let me tell you about some perspectives I developed about how mindsets can encourage rapid improvements. Here's the starting point: Extreme optimists, like me, are naturally drawn to the subject of perfection, the extreme optimist's ultimate objective.
I had help in...
The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
--Albert Einstein
I have always been fascinated with the past. As a youngster, the older a story, myth, or legend was, the better I liked it. By quite a young age, David, Icarus, and Ulysses seemed quite real to me.
That interest soon led me into reading histories as well. The battle of...
