Stephen Lovegrove Quotes

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

The hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstance in explaining success.

In information technology, money is not the issue. Willingness to implement and execute is the issue.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

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.

My view is that, as management, the focus has to be on having a strategy and executing it. As you do the strategy and execution, it is important to communicate it consistently.

And the reason for focusing on that time frame is that it's going to take us a considerable period of time to develop the new capabilities, processes and organizations that will be needed.

Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed? If you have, prosecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try and assist you in the formation of some plan for the army.

This is a business that is much easier planned than executed.

No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system

Good organization does not necessarily mean it will produce good policy. But bad organization will almost never produce good policy.

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

It is not how much you spend on defense as much as how you spend it.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

The 6 Ps: Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

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

For organisations, flexibility is a must to cope with fluctuations in demand and remain competitive, and people must be able to develop adaptable attitudes to quickly embrace evolving business conditions, new business opportunities, and shifting strategies.

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.

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.

Strategic Work is all about the big questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Tactical Work is all about answers: This is the system we use to do each task. This is how we do it, how we measure it, how we monitor it.

Too often in business, only financial data is gathered - and then it is distributed only to management. Other key indicators that relate to performance areas also need to be tracked. Information on performance has to be made available to those people who can best use it - those doing the work.

You have to have an idea of what you need to do, what needs to be fixed, what can be improved, what we should now imagine together which we didn't previously imagine. And having thought of it, decide to go it. And that's the government's role.

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.