Sublime

One of my biggest leadership tasks is to remove the obstacles to great performance. One of the biggest obstacles I encountered was this misdirection of information. The company dramatically improved when I clarified who needed what information.

most new developments occur from outside an industry.

For people to want to own the responsibility, and stop being victims, I had to change my behavior. I loved rescuing people. I loved solving problems. The result? People were lined up waiting to be rescued. People kept bringing me problems to solve. My people did just what I wanted them to do. If I wanted to play head buffalo, they were more than wi

Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas,

One of the most powerful value-added strategies I've discovered is to identify the most profitable niche we can successfully serve, and then dominate that niche.

It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new

Begin by Asking the Thinking-Strategically Questions • What skills, attitudes, and behaviors of people are required to deliver great performance? • What positions give me the maximum leverage to infuse these skills, attitudes, and behaviors throughout the organization?

John Carlin, “If the World’s Greatest Chef Cooked for a Living, He’d Starve,” Guardian, December 11, 2006, http://observer.theguardian.com/foodmonthly/futureoffood/story/0,,1969713,00.html

When he landed in Japan decades later, he, more than any of the other Americans there, immediately grasped how crucial the special arrangement between Japanese companies and their employees was and why it led to superior quality. This line of thinking would become what I believe is the striking difference between the System of Profound Knowledge an