Rosabeth Moss Kanter
People who are making decisions about the future often don't have access to some of the best ideas in the company, which may be at the periphery or at lower levels.Collection: Ideas
Leaders is the new organisation do not lack motivational tools, but the tools are different from those of traditional corporate bureaucrats. The new rewards are based not on status but on contribution, and they consist not of regular promotion and automatic pay rises, but of excitement about the mission and a share of the glory of success.Collection: Leadership
Innovation is an outgrowth of initiative, and initiative - taking positive actions in a belief that your actions can make a difference - is a big part of confidence.Collection: Innovation
Thinkers, makers and traders are the DNA of the world class companyCollection: Dna
Throughout human history, people have developed strong loyalties to traditions, rituals, and symbols. In the most effective organizations, they are not only respected but celebrated. It is no coincidence that the most highly admired corporations are also among the most profitable. Why? Because everyone involved is committed to certain non-negotiable core values. Traditions keep them alive. Rituals such as special occasions reaffirm them. Symbols serve as constant reminders of their enduring importance.Collection: Loyalty
Power stems from 'rainmaking,' as law firms put it: the ability to bring resources into the company.Collection: Power
Creativity does not derive from order but from the attempt to impose order where it does not exist, to make new connections.Collection: Creativity
Pessimists see problems as stemming from stable and universal causes, thus making them less susceptible to corrective action. Optimists, in contrast, view problems as temporary and resulting from specific factors that will either change or be changed.Collection: Views
Winning becomes easier over time as the cornerstones of confidence become habits.Collection: Confidence
Confidence is not just in people's heads; it comes from the culture of the organization. It's easier to expect success when working in an organization that has a culture of accountability, collaboration, and initiative. Without this, it's easier - and more self-protective - to assume failure so the person is not disappointed and instead pleasantly surprised.Collection: Accountability
Sports is a perfect activity in which to see streaks and cycles, organizational and otherwise, in action - and to watch confidence build or erode. There are repeated episodes of performance with similar rules and clear winners or losers. I added team sports to my studies of business because there are excellent parallels to work groups in the performance of sports teams and also excellent parallels to larger, more complex businesses or organizations in the strategy, structure, and culture surrounding any particular team.Collection: Sports
Sometimes you lose - perhaps because you play against the very best, or because surprises happen - but if there is organizational confidence, you bounce back from losses and convert them to successes.Collection: Loss
Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.Collection: Absolute Power
A basic truth of management - if not of life - is that nearly everything looks like a failure in the middle.Collection: Looks
The importance of discretion increases with closeness to the top of a hierarchical organization.Collection: Business
I wonder whether there has been too much emphasis on teaching women to conform, to fit into the system. Certainly that suits conservative organizations in conservative times. But now ... innovation and creativity are necessary.Collection: Teaching
After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.Collection: Order
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.Collection: Inspirational
The behavior of people and the culture of an organization are very different in winning streaks and losing streaks. But what both have in common is their momentum - once winners' or losers' habits and culture take hold, they tend to perpetuate themselves.Collection: Winning
John Akers once said that changing IBM's culture was more difficult than getting elephants to dance. Of course it's really difficult, as Lou Gerstner also found out years later. The title of his own book is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? He and his top executives were change masters at IBM. All organizations, especially the larger ones, will always need change masters. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and efforts to improve it should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Regrettably, that is often not the case.Collection: Book
Life is full of cycles that have a way of perpetuating themselves. Success and failure both feed on themselves. Things can go downhill quickly, with people bogged down by ineffective behavior and poor teamwork, unless leaders intervene to shift the cycle.Collection: Teamwork
Time is a function of impact. The longer a book of mine has been in print, the greater its impact seems to be as people absorb and digest my ideas. I am especially proud of The Change Master: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, first published in 1983, because it raised questions and addressed issues at a time when so many great changes were occurring in our society, indeed throughout the world.Collection: Book
"Leadership" is a big topic today. We know that the world - nations and communities in addition to companies - needs more and better leaders. So I wanted to explore how leaders make a difference, how they can shift a negative cycle, turn around a losing organization, propel a team to victory when conditions aren't perfect. I saw that what leaders do is build confidence in advance of victory. Then the confidence they produce makes the hope of success turn into the reality of success, because people behave differently when they are surrounded by a culture of confidence.Collection: Team
in most important ways, leaders of the future will need the traits and capabilities of leaders throughout history: an eye for change and a steadying hand to provide both vision and reassurance that change can be mastered, a voice that articulates the will of the group and shapes it to constructive ends, and an ability to inspire by force of personality while making others feel empowered to increase and use their own abilities.Collection: Leadership
America can restore its strengths as the world-respected land of opportunity by returning to open-society principles. An open society invests in people and new ideas, rewards talent and hard work, values dialogue and learns from dissent, operates to high standards with transparent information, looks for common ground, sees problems as opportunities for creative change, and encourages those who are fortunate to help others get the same chance, because service is the highest ideal. With such standards in mind, America the Beautiful can return to its admired role as America the Principled.Collection: Beautiful
The positive outlook that optimists project does not come from ignoring or denying problems. Optimists simply assume that problems are temporary and can be solved, so optimists naturally want more information about problems because then they can get to work and do something. Pessimists are more likely to believe that there is nothing they can do anyway, so what's the point of even thinking about it?Collection: Believe
Everything looks like a failure in the middle.Collection: Looks
Competition has never been more threatening than it is now. Innovative thinkers challenge the status quo in their organizations. They are often viewed as "troublemakers." They threaten the defenders of the status quo. So competition within an organization can also be brutal. The most effective leaders overcome "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom" by being change agents themselves. They encourage and reward innovative thinking. I have observed that people only resist changes imposed on them by other people.Collection: Thinking
... people are capable of more than their organizational positions ever give them the tools or the time or the opportunity to demonstrate.Collection: Opportunity
Power is the ability to get things doneCollection: Done
Our future will be shaped by the assumptions we make about who we are and what we can be.Collection: Future
It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that's what leadership is.Collection: Leadership
If world problems feel too big to tackle, think small. Step by step. Small wins build confidence, lead the way to change.Collection: Leadership
The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.Collection: Business
What being among the 'right people' entails is the possession of human capital, rather than organizational capital: an individual reputation, portable skills, and network connections. Career responsibility is squarely in the hands of individuals, a function of their knowledge and networks. Transferable knowledge is more important to a career than firm-specific knowledge.Collection: Work
Confidence makes you willing to try harder and attracts the kind of support from others that makes "winning" possible.Collection: Winning
Lack of opportunity breeds dreams of escape. But professionals and managers who have invested in their careers do not leave the work force as frequently as discouraged workers in lower status occupations. Instead, they keep working, but they escape emotionally by defining achievement in professional, not company, terms. ... Thus, the potential for being stuck as career uncertainty grows takes its toll in weakening attachment to any particular employer.Collection: Dream
Confidence is the bridge connecting expectations and performance, investment and results.Collection: Confidence
You've no future unless you add value, create projects.Collection: Add
It is easier to talk about money -- and much easier to talk about sex -- than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it; people who want it do not want to appear to hunger for it; and people who engage in its machinations do so secretly.Collection: Money
Confidence is the sweet spot between arrogance and despair-consisting of positive expectations for favorable outcomes.Collection: Confidence
Perpetuating success or sliding into decline is the result of many intersecting forces that reinforce one another directly and indirectly. They are both cause and effect of winning or losing. Winning generates positive forces, losing generates negative forces.Collection: Winning
Peter Drucker being one of the most important influences because he has helped to think differently about organizational leadership and management. Frankly, I learn something of value from everyone I meet. My Harvard colleagues. My students. The executives I work with. For an eager student, which is what I am, there is so much to be learned from everyday experiences. I'm a sponge. Always will be.Collection: Thinking
Confidence is not lodged in people's brains, it comes from the support system that surrounds them. Let's not confuse confidence overall with just self-confidence. Self-confidence is only one part of confidence. People also need confidence in others - their colleagues and leaders - that they can count on them to do the right thing and not to let them down.Collection: People
No" is always an easier stand than "Yes.Collection: Easier
During the Boom Years, it was so easy to lose sight of basic values. For example, there was lots of nonsense said and written about the so-called "New Economy." Some people said all economic laws have been overturned! Then all the problems developed. Corporations were heavily fined for illegalities. Many of their senior-level executives were indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.Collection: People
Power is America's last dirty word. It is easier to talk about money - and much easier to talk about sex - than it is to talk about power.Collection: Sex
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.Collection: Business
Corporate men and women, once divided by striking differences in opportunity for career growth, have come to share career chaos.Collection: Opportunity