William McDonough Quotes

Your job as CEO is to be the fastest person of the company.

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

You cannot change strategy due to a trend.

Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.

Being the puppet master, it's like running Nintendo of America.

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

… the brilliance of Coca-Cola capitalism:. By not owning its many distributors and by relying on native intermediaries in foreign nations, Coke could claim that it was a critical component of the local economy.... Once embedded in host communities, Coca-Cola became very difficult to dislodge, even in places where it caused serious environmental problems, because killing Coke meant killing jobs. In impoverished communities, ... the argument of dollars and cents won the day.

Execution without a long term strategy leads nowhere. Likewise a long term strategy without execution leads nowhere.

I feel like the business side came more naturally to me along with the product design side, but managing and effectively leading large organizations of people is something that is perpetually challenging and the topic on which I am constantly looking for good advice.

I'm really more of an executive.

The remarkable thing about management is that a manager can go on for years making mistakes that nobody is aware of, which means that management can be a kind of a con job.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual phrased, it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic".

Management works in the system; leadership works on the system.

On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink. The same goes for strategies. How many organizations carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?

Leaders are people who do the right thing: managers are people who do things right. Both roles are crucial, but they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing wrong things well.

The real heart of strategy is the strategist.

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

If the only common thread you have as an industrial company is the fact that you think you're well managed, you can still be a pretty good company, but you're not going to be a dominant company, a competitive company over time.

The CEO's job is always about leadership. It's about leadership in a vision, in terms of where you're going, it's about making sure that you have the right organization and staff, and that you have kind of clearly communicated what some of the plays are and what some of the goals are in terms of the business and how do you organize together in order to make that happen.

Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.

Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy. It is just a waste of resources.

I don't think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he's kind of managing companies and every day he's working making sure this is in place and that's in place.

All good management is the expression of one great idea