Eckhard Pfeiffer Quotes

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?'

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.

Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

In my experience, what is often missing between intent and action is the knowledge and the means to actually change the way we do business or make consumer decisions.

As CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, we used a concept called 'search and reapply,' which meant that if we found better ways of doing something, then we would do it.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

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.

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.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

I got to get the right people in the right job. Because a lot of costs can be taken out in the context of your administration without the legislature. For example, using technology to do more with less. Using technology to fight fraud. Reorganizing and streamlining can be done within the context of the administration.

Incremental change will not solve this nation’s problems.

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face

There are limits to what reorganization and reform can do.

Redesigning a strategy is an excellent way to avoid implementing the strategy.

The consolidation that we started in 2009 was clearly the requirement of that time.

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.

The success, or failure, of a CEO to implement AI throughout the organization will depend on them hiring a leader to build an organization to do this. In some companies, CIOs or chief data officers are playing this role.

When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.

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

A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.