Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.
Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people.
Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.
Organizations should be built and managers should be functioning so people can be naturally empowered. If someone's doing their job, if someone's working in one of your warehouses, say, they should know their job better than anybody. They don't need to be 'empowered,' but encouraged and left alone to be able to do what they know best.
Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.
Basically, managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes, managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.
The story is a testament to the consolations that get me through and give meaning to every area of my life
My dad was in the Army. The Army's not great pay, but, you know, we moved from Army patch to Army patch wherever that was. The Army also contributed to sending me off to boarding school.
If we were to do as well as we know, our salvation would be secure.
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.