Douglas Conant Quotes

We would rather have our employees running our business.

Delegating doesn't mean passing off work you don't enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.

I have a foundational belief that business results start with culture and your people.

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.

Hire the best people, and trust what you hired them to do.

Have very frequent talks with employees because they are your best allies.

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

As for whether I am a 'new age guru', I am not at all. I help companies build employees who lead without a title and become high performers.

There is no better way to manage than by walking around. Autocracy doesn't work. Talk to people in their offices, find out what's on their minds.

People really are our most important resource, and people who don't realize that and choose not to live that way, choose not to lead that way, are paying a price for that in many of our companies, many of our organizations.

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

I think management is about just that - managing people via man-to-man skills.

The players make the manager, it's never the other way.

You are only as successful as the people who work for you want you to be.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

The key to good management is keeping the guys on your team who hate your guts away from the guys who haven't made up their minds.

I can't tell you how many thousands of small moments that I've had with employees in our company that have been nothing more than a one-on-one. I'll see the baggage-services person, he or she is by himself. I'll pull them off to the side and have a 15-minute conversation about their history, their life, that kind of thing.

If you're thinking about your brand over your people, you've lost yourself.

If you hire great people, and they're all self-motivated, then you can get by without a lot of structure.

I try to hire good people and let them do their job and don't question how they do things.

Put the right people in the right places, and then you trust them to do the right stuff.

One of the main tasks of a manager is psychology.

The Panda mission really speaks to our philosophy. It is, 'Deliver exceptional Asian dining experiences by building an organization where people are inspired to better their lives.' I'm talking about everyone who works at Panda. They're inspired to better their own lives.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it's pretty much the whole game today.

I've never seen myself as a manager. As a manager, you have to put all your time into the job, and that would be difficult for me.