Ken Blanchard Quotes

There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.

Execution really shapes whether your company takes off or not.

A C.E.O.'s job is leadership, problem solving, and team building. I've done that my whole career.

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.

Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.

Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there.

I never took classic business classes in college, so I don't have the background that any of the people running large companies have.

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

A leader is the one who can outline the broad vision and the direction, and say here's where we are going to go, here's why we need to go there, and here's how we are going to get there. A manager is the one who actually gets up under the hood and tunes the carburetor.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

Providing the vision is easy. Getting policy right is hard. The hard thing about the modern world is doing it. The world is changing so fast.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

Vision without execution is delusion.

Some people are really good at the visionary role. They're like third grade teachers who tell people the vision and values over and over and over until they get it right, right, right. But they're not implementers. If they're good leaders, they gather people around them who can take the implementation role and move it forward.

Leaders tend to focus on 'what to do,' but the real issue is more often 'how to do it.'

You have got to get the strategy right; you have to get the operations right - lined up from R&D out to the field.

I feel very good about our business and the speed at which we are executing our strategy to drive differentiation for Accenture and accelerate our rotation to The New.

A company can set off in one direction, figures out that it's not the right way to go, and then go in an entirely new direction. Over time, the product or service improves, and the company gets better at executing and delivering.

Coaching was something I've never had much interest in. I've always been a big-picture guy, like a manager has to be.

I think it's extremely important to think of your company as a series of chapters.

When we talk about change, we, the business leaders, have to implement it. We have to look at what we're not doing and what we should be doing.