Quotes & Sayings About Performance In Business

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society. — Peter Drucker

Like squirrels, the best in every business do what they have learned to do without questioning their abilities - they flat out trust their skills, which is why we call this high-performance state of mind the "Trusting Mindset." — John Eliot

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue. — Jeff Raikes

In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job. — James C. Collins

Chinese whisper games will start, where one woman will nod at a young dancing girl, asking a question that is passed down the row from one woman to another, before a response comes back up the line in the same manner. These women are in the business of finding wives for their sons and they offer up occasional commentary on the performance before them.
"Not so pretty. Her sister is better."
"That poor one will have a hard time, yes. The dark skin - she is already an old woman. She will have to wait, yes."
Information about the girl's family's honor, purity, and place in society is also exchanged — Jenny Nordberg

In an environment where there is a shared vision of excellence, where people can be the best they can be on a daily basis, where they know what is expected of them, understand that reward is linked to performance, and believe they can make a difference because they will be heard, they will make a difference. They will go beyond our expectations and great things will happen. — Frederick Smith

If your in business your in show business. The moment you get to work your on stage. Give your performance of your life. — Robin Sharma

As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance? — Michael Porter

Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance. — Larry McMurtry

The business management is, in essence, the decision management and performance management continuum. — Pearl Zhu

Master data management is a discipline that goes hand in hand with information governance. Forward-thinking organizations are instituting processes to gain agreement on roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures surrounding the maintenance of a single view of the entities needed for conducting business and measuring its performance,. — Henry M. Morris

Time and again-from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the events of 9/11 to the onset of the Arab Spring-events have caught the experts, whether in government or on the outside, completely by surprise. Business owners with comparable performance records go bust. Brokers lose their clients. Physicians get sued for malpractice. Yet think-tankers and policy wonks continue to opine, never pausing to reflect on-or apologize for-their spotty records. — Andrew Bacevich

Creating the culture of burnout is opposite to creating a culture of sustainable creativity. This is something that needs to be taught in business schools. This mentality needs to be introduced as a leadership and performance-enhancing tool. — Arianna Huffington

'Performance' gave me doubts about my way of life. Before that, I had been completely involved in the more bawdy side of the film business. But after that, everything changed. — James Fox

Your career growth depends mainly on how well you can articulate and present your performance review. — Abhishek Ratna

Trusting in Something Other Than God Another way you Edge God Out is when you trust in something other than the character and unconditional love of God as your source of security and self-worth. When you put your sense of security and self-worth in your intellect, your position, your performance, your possessions, or your business and personal contacts, you're counting on things that are at-risk and temporary. Instead, you must place your trust in that which is sure and eternal: God's care for you and the wisdom He provides about living in harmony with the rest of His creation. — Kenneth H. Blanchard

It was the power of having each other's backs that made this possible and resulted in a long-term business partnership and friendship. At HeroicPublicSpeaking, we offer tons of free tips sheets, guides, e-books, and video training on public speaking and on-camera performance techniques for both professionals and laymen alike. So, if you have a wedding toast, a big presentation, a sales pitch, or just want to improve your ability to communicate, head over there now. — Anonymous

It's a good note for any young hopeful in this business to take: study up and make sure you are informed at all times because knowing how to anticipate someone's subtle nuances in a performance will only elevate your own art! — Tisha Campbell-Martin

We are basically in the nicotine business ... Effective control of nicotine in our products should equate to a significant product performance and cost advantage. — R. J. Reynolds

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality. — Harold S. Geneen

The first step toward enhancing performance in an organization is realizing that improvement is possible only if participants abandon business-as-usual practices. Doing so requires recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths. — Anders Ericsson

County government can be simplified greatly by reorganizing and consolidating some of the offices, making others appointive, and reducing salaries in keeping with the salaries paid by private business for the performance of similar duties. — Arthur Capper

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling. — Clayton Christensen

Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend. — W. Edwards Deming

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities. — Helen DeWitt

The praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a little praying put in as we put flavor to give it a pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body, and form the blood and bones. Prayer is no petty duty, put into a corner; no piecemeal performance made out of the fragments of time which have been snatched from business and other engagements of life; but it means that the best of our time, the heart of our time and strength must be given. — E. M. Bounds

Since 1870 a commander has seldom if ever been able to survey a whole battlefield from a single spot; and in any case he has had little opportunity - although sometimes a considerable inclination - to try. For the modern commander is much more akin to the managing director of a large conglomerate enterprise than ever he is to the warrior chief of old. He has become the head of a complex military organization, whose many branches he must oversee and on whose cooperation, assistance, and support he depends for his success. As the size and complexity of military forces have increased, the business of war has developed an organizational dimension that can make a mighty contribution to triumph - or to tragedy. Hitherto, the role of this organizational dimension of war in explaining military performance has been strangely neglected. We shall return to it later - indeed, it will form one of the major themes of this book. For now we simply need to note its looming presence. — Eliot A. Cohen

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization. — David J. Anderson

Companies have to nurture [creativity and motivation]-and have to do it by building a compassionate yet performance-driven corporate culture. In the knowledge economy the traditional soft people side of our business has become the new hard side. — Gay Mitchell

What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite - and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results. — Peter Drucker

Personal matters aren't really any of my business. I don't care who is sleeping with whom for example unless it is somehow affecting an individual's performance in the public arena — Terry Mosher

In business, poor performance leads to bankruptcy or, at a minimum, a restructuring of the company. In American education, failure entitles the bankrupt system to even more taxpayer dollars. — Cal Thomas

Although we can't control which roles are assigned to us, it must be our business to act our given role as best we possibly can and to refrain from complaining about it. Where ever you find yourself and in whatever circumstances, give an impeccable performance. — Epictetus

... the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope — Samuel Johnson

Kaizen should be done when times are good or when the company is profitable, since your efforts to streamline and make improvements when the company is poor are limited to reduction in staff. Even if you try to go lean and cut out the fat to improve business performance, when your business is in a very difficult position financially there is no fat to be cut. If you are cutting out muscle, which you need, then you cannot say that your efforts to become lean are succeeding.The most important thing about doing kaizen is to do kaizen when times are good, the economy is strong, and the company is profitable — Taiichi Ohno

True, the number of functional managers should always be kept at a minimum, and there should be the largest possible number of 'general' managers who manage an integrated business and are directly responsible for its performance and results. Even with the utmost application of this principle the great bulk of managers will remain in functional jobs, however. This is particularly true of the younger people. A — Peter F. Drucker

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance ... you thrive on that. — Bill Gates

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

Our 2015 financial performance will continue to be driven by our Home Robot business. Home Robot revenue is expected to grow 10% to 12% in 2015 and comprise 90% of total company revenue. — Colin Angle

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile. — George Bernard Shaw

The connection between health and productivity at work is intuitively obvious but has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of either researchers or corporate financial officers. Ronald Kessler and Paul Stang help to bridge the usual gap between research and the marketplace with the help of a top-notch group of the best 'real-world' investigators obtainable-all in the cause of making the case that employee health should be treated as an investment in business performance-thus creating the new discipline of health and productivity management. — Sean Sullivan

It is surprising, in the welter of questions that one gets at (AGMs), how few actually relate to the performance of the company, or the decisions taken by the board in particular areas. — John Harvey-Jones

obvious, rather than rolling up numerous ad hoc spreadsheets, and an effective and broad system for data capture can save time and increase visibility into business performance. Without it, you must be very precise in the data you collect in order to avoid overburdening the organization or hitting material data-quality issues. However, don't let a broad reporting system allow you to neglect the process of effective reporting. A mass of data is not the same as a report. Even if executives can drill down into real-time portfolio information, that is too ad hoc to be a process for keeping projects on track, and you will still need a structure of reports — Simon Moore

Mom is calculated, logical, business-minded; kind but very, very direct. Makes you better by giving you these little pointers but doesn't baby you. My dad is a Chatty Cathy, the social butterfly; friendly; knows everybody in the whole world by six degrees; tells me that every performance is the greatest he's ever seen, every new outfit is the coolest. Constant cheerleader. It's cool to have pie-in-the-sky Dad, down-to-earth Mom. — Taylor Swift

Emotions don't distract high performers. — Abhishek Ratna

I've never been in a business where safety performance was excellent and the business performance was not, so they go hand in hand, and for me, safety performance is an indication of discipline, of focus and of how joined up an organisation is. — Cynthia Carroll

We all know business financial performance improves when more women are in senior levels of management and leadership. — Beth Brooke

In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical. — Benjamin Graham

Virtue is more clearly shown in the performance of fine ACTIONS than in the non-performance of base ones. — Aristotle.

Research conducted throughout the world shows gender balance in top positions contributes to improved competitiveness and better business performance. — Beth Brooke