If you’re anything like me, you have an ongoing list of quotes that you gather while reading. Today I’d like to share with you 25 quotes from a very long list. You may recognize a few of them if you been keeping up with my Friday Reads book recommendations. I hope you find them inspiring and thought provoking.
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
Richard Branson
“Conscious managers exercise a minimum amount of control. Their role is not to control other people. It is to create the conditions that allow for more self-management.”
John Mackey & Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
“Truly human leadership protects an organization from internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result.”
Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last
“The question is not how you can make better rules, but how can you support teams in finding the best solution. How can you strengthen the possibilities of the team members so that they need the least amount of direction setting from above?”
Jos De Block
“When we see life as a journey of discovery, then we learn to deal more gracefully with the setbacks, the mistakes, and the roadblocks in our life. We can start to grasp the spiritual insight that there are no mistakes, simply experiences that point us to a deeper truth about ourselves and the world.”
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
“When success is measured solely in terms of money and recognition, when growth and the bottom line are the only thing that count, when the only successful life is the one that reaches the top, we are bound to experience a sense of emptiness in our lives.”
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
“When you force people into slots you get slot shaped contributions. You want to turn sheep into shepherds.”
Drew Williams
“If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don’t need control. They know what needs to be done and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchies and control mechanisms you need.”
Herb Kelleher
“We need to put individuals before organizations. To do this we need to do the following: 1. Decentralize power whenever possible. 2. Emphasize community over hierarchy. 3. Ensure transparency in decision making. 4. Make leaders more accountable to the led. 5. Align rewards with contribution rather than with power or position. 6. Substitute peer review for top down review. 7. Steadily enlarge the scope of self-determination.”
Gary Hamel, What Matters Now
“Hierarchy of human capabilities at work. 1 obedience, 2 diligence, 3 expertise, 4 initiative, 5 creativity, 6 passion. 1, 2 and 3 can be rewarded externally by incentives or demands. 4, 5, and 6 are internally driven and can’t be demanded or required. They are gifts that can’t be commanded.”
Gary Hamel, What Matters Now
“How many policies exist just to preserve the fiction that the higher ups are in control? How many rules enforce standardization at the expense of initiative and passion while delivering few if any benefits?”
Gary Hamel, What Matters Now
“When you force people into slots you get slot shaped contributions. You want to turn sheep into shepherds.”
Drew Williams
“All human systems are self-organizing and naturally tend towards high performance provided the essential preconditions are present and sustained.”
Harrison Owen, Wave Rider
“High Performance is less a matter of doing something… but rather being fully and intentionally what we already are: a self-organizing system.”
Harrison Owen, Wave Rider
“Passion alone = flashy all sizzle and no steak. Responsibility alone = simply boring. Passion + Responsibility = Authentic Leadership.”
Harrison Owen, Wave Rider
“How Many policies exist just to preserve the fiction that the higher ups are in control? How many rules enforce standardization at the expense of initiative and passion while delivering few if any benefits?”
Blair Vernon
The informal organization which does not appear on any organizational chart consists of the informal contacts among themselves that employees use to get things done.
Gary Dressier
“A good Game has 4 elements. 1. A clearly defined Goal. 2. Clear understanding of the rules. 3. a way to easily and quickly track progress towards the goal. 4players must opt in voluntarily.”
Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken
Read my post on Reality is Broken.
“Let’s take golf to start. As a golfer you have a clear goal: to get the ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t playing a game you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to the hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes Golf a Game is that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each hole and swing at the ball with a club. Golf is engaging exactly because you along with the other players have agreed to make the work more challenging than it has any reasonable right to be.”
Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken
Read my post on Reality is Broken.
“The prevailing positive-psychology theory that we are the one and only source of our own happiness isn’t just a metaphor. It is a biological fact. Our brains and bodies produce neurochemicals and physiological sensations that we experience, in different quantities and combinations, as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment, love, and every other kind of happiness. And positive psychologists have shown that we don’t have to wait for life to trigger these chemicals and sensations for us. We can trigger them ourselves by… undertaking a difficult challenge… accomplishing something very hard for us…making someone laugh…or…being part of something larger than ourselves that has lasting significance beyond our individual lives.”
Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken
Read my post on Reality is Broken.
“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Bernard Suits
Everyone’s a manager here. The job of managing includes planning, organizing, directing, staffing, and control, and everyone at Morning Star is expected to do all of these things.
Chris Rufer
It was a whole different business, nothing like I’d ever known, like night and day… Thirty seconds of play and I am on a whole new plane of being, all of my synapses wailing.
David Sudnow about playing the video game Breakout
“We have been conditioned to believe that the wrong things will make us lastingly happy.”
Sonia Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness
Read my post on The How of Happiness.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Peter Drucker
Cheers for Friday,
Gavin Watson, Chair, Conscious Capitalism Connecticut Chapter
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