Michael Gerber Quotes

But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done - this was something else again.

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

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

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

A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results.

One thing I've learned about his business is this whole 'plan thing' - it doesn't work.

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

Business principles are only as good as the practices that back them up.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

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

The more Strategic Work you do, the more effective, productive, and joyful the Tactical Work becomes.

Management always has a big influence on your success, no matter how good or how bad the business is itself.

The one thing you have to be careful of is trying to do what other teams and players are doing when you don't have the people to do it yourself.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.

If you're going to be successful, you better have a goal, you better find really good people, better understand where all the money's coming from. And you better measure the living daylights out of it.

The good thing about execution issues are that they are within our control.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

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

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.

I know what we do really well - I just try and keep us focused on doing that.