Top 69 Quotes & Sayings by Jeffrey Pfeffer

I am not sure any of the material in Leadership BS would be helpful for small companies and certainly not their owners. Of course, even owners have bosses and need to worry about keeping their jobs - so Power might be more appropriate.

Those who have power a) understand that the world is not always a just and fair place and accept that fact, b) understand the bases and strategies for acquiring power, and c) take actions consistent with their knowledge in a skillful way. Skill at anything requires practice, and power skills are no different.

So, the three qualities of a workplace that would develop people would be information sharing, investing in the training of the workforce, and giving employees the ability to use their training and information to make decisions.

My overall recommendation: for decades corporate policy manuals and HR departments have told people they are responsible for their own careers. It's about time people really heeded those warnings.

Being memorable equals getting picked.

Doing the right thing is important, which is where strategy comes in. But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. After all, every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth. So, success depends on execution—on the ability to get things done.

Lying is common in social life, often done for benign purposes, seldom draws severe sanctions, and many of the most notable leaders, including the late Steve Jobs, were consummate prevaricators. Told with enough persistence and conviction, what was once untrue can become true, in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way.

Great strategy, not executed, can't possibly have any effect on performance because it doesn't actually affect anything. It's like planning for a successful surgery to remove a tumor. If no one picks up the knife and actually operates effectively, the diseases will persist.

People need to be ready to have truly "global" careers. Just as companies now face world-wide competition, so, too, do people. Therefore, individuals need to get out in the world more - some large percentage of Americans don't even have a passport - and work in different countries.

The single most significant change has been the globalization of labor markets. Product markets - trade in goods - have been globalizing for years. But now, with the reduction in communication expenses and the building of all sorts of IT infrastructure, essentially any job can be done almost anywhere.

In any branding strategy, you need to figure out what is the image you want to project. Then behave accordingly. And above all, cultivate the media and those who will help you burnish your reputation.

Personal growth and professional development require mostly being treated like an adult, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens in most workplaces. People need to be able to make decisions. To do that effectively, they need information and training in how to use it.

To paraphrase the late management thinker and writer, Peter Drucker, thinking is hard work, which is why so few people (including actually senior managers) do it. Once there is some "conventional," seemingly-reasonable story, people just accept it and don't ask, "is this actually true? Is it consistent with the data?" And this extends to the highest reaches of organizational life.

I don't think eliminating the knowing-doing gap depends on the amount of knowledge around. It depends much more on people's attitudes and intentions - do they actually want to turn knowledge into action, or just go through the motions of acting as if they are busy or are accomplishing something.

Nothing comes without trade-offs. Do you want to spend time with people who like, or with people who might be useful to you? Do you really want to put in the long hours and constant attention required to be successful in your quest for power? Do you really want to be under the microscope on a daily basis, with people commenting on the car you drive, where you live, where you go on vacation, and so forth? There is no way to avoid the price of power. It's up to you to decide if it is worth it, and to change course when it isn't.

We give up and don't try. We don't take sufficient chances or risks. We aren't resilient in the face of failure. We follow the "rules" too much and don't push the envelope.

I would give Obama a "C." He gets an "A" for understanding this country's profound problems in education, health care, infrastructure, and economic competitiveness, and for surrounding himself with extremely skilled and knowledgeable people who know what to do. He probably gets an "F," ironically, in his ability to sell these ideas to the American public and to be angry enough, conniving enough, and frankly mean enough to get them implemented and understood.

As many people know, our job market problems began long before the latest recession. We have faced literally decades with no substantive increase in median wages, and job growth, except in health and government jobs such as education, has been stagnant for a while. People are now expected to travel more and to work at odd hours to coordinate with people all over the world. Simply put, companies have prospered, but for the most part, people have not.

Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his own approach accordingly. One of the reasons he has so fascinated biographer Robert Caro over the years is Johnson's consummate skill in acquiring and using influence.

The single biggest barrier to effective leadership is, in my view, the leadership industry itself. Instead of telling people the skills and behaviors they need to be effective in getting things done, we tell them almost the opposite - blandishments about how we wish people would be, and how we wish workplaces were. That information is worse than useless as, to the extent people believe it, they often wind up losing their jobs.

Witness Donald Trump's current presidential campaign. So first people need to find the white spaces, the unexploited or underexploited niches where there is less competition and more opportunity.

While it is almost certainly true that leaders ought to eat last, the evidence on the ever-widening difference between CEO and average employee pay and the enormous severance packages leaders obtain even as front-line workers see their economic well-being eviscerated makes a mockery of the idea that leaders do anything other than take care of themselves.

The best path to power combines two things: 1) a path that not many are taking and 2) something that you are capable and comfortable with doing.

Knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.

Everyone faces defeats, setbacks, reversals of fortune. But just like water wearing away rock, persistence triumphs. Resilience is one of the most important qualities I would look at in trying to predict who is going to be ultimately successful.

Successful organizations understand the importance of implementation, not just strategy, and, moreover, recognize the crucial role of their people in this process.

With respect to trust, people tell me that it is essential for organizational functioning. Maybe, but most surveys of trust find that trust in leaders is low and nonetheless, organizations role along quite nicely.

Most organisations say they want creativity, but really they do not.

I completely reject the idea that working adults need to be treated like infants or worse and not told the realities, harsh or not, about the world of work. Keeping people in the dark and filling them with stories that are either mostly fabricated, unusually rare, or both, doesn't do anyone any good. It is one of the reasons that workplaces and careers remain in such dire straits.

People who don't have as much power as they would like often begin by attributing their difficulties to the environment - competitors, bosses, economic circumstances, and so forth. But in reality people are customarily their own biggest impediment to being as powerful as they would like.

People will envy you to the extent that you start out with a group of people and you rise up the organization faster than them. Get over what your peers are thinking about you because your peers are also your competitors.

Many companies believe incentives, financial incentives, are the answer to every problem or issue. But people are motivated by much more than money. In particular, people like to feel good about themselves and maintain their self-esteem. If companies spent more time working on people's feelings of self-worth, they wouldn't have to try, often unsuccessfully, to bribe people to do work.

We now live in an era of the permanent campaign - all marketing and messaging all the time. We clearly live in an era where the "truth" doesn't matter much - people tell lies about things ranging from the likelihood of "death panels" to the effects of the stimulus on saving this economy from a true calamity. In such a context, Obama himself needs to be "selling" all the time, as does his team, and also be more forceful in advocating their views. He needs to project that he and his ideas will win. And I don't think he has yet done that.

Part of strategy is figuring out what you're good at, figuring out what you're not good at, and then getting yourself in position to succeed by doing mostly what you have a competitive advantage doing.

Career success depends on people's educational credentials, their length of service (job tenure), unfortunately it is still the case on their race, gender, and similarity to those in power, and of course, on their political skills. Job performance matters, but less than most people think.

I am increasingly convinced that people who have power are not necessarily smarter than others. Beyond a certain level of intelligence and level in the hierarchy, everyone is smart. What differentiates people is their political skill and savvy.

Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught a long time ago, company performance often results more from variations in systems than from the individuals doing the work.

Business school graduates from the best schools earn large salaries and frequently rise to positions of great power. It would be nice if they used that power to truly make the world a better place - which entails more than just maximizing their own organization's profits and their own economic well-being.

People clearly want to believe that the world is a just and fair place. It provides them a sense of control and makes them psychologically comfortable. But believing that the world is a just and fair place causes people to not do enough to take care of themselves and to be unprepared for when it isn't so nice. So, people need to understand their tendencies to see the world as just and fair and then be realistic about the actual conditions in which they find themselves.

The individual attributes of warmth and competence are often perceived to be negatively correlated. That doesn't mean they actually are, but that's how people perceive the world. So, cruel people, those who gave negative book reviews, for instance, were seen as less likeable but as more intelligent.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives. In fact, many good political biographies are useful in learning about power, strategy, and decision-making.

One cannot control the actions of others, but we are responsible for what we do. People say things such as, "I can't do this," "it is not really me," "this makes me uncomfortable," etc. People, simply put, opt out of playing the game or doing so in a way that will make them successful. So get over yourself, and do what you need to do - and what, by the way, others around you are doing, to become more powerful.

Many of our students want to do what they have done and that has made them successful thus far in their lives: play by the rules, and do what is expected. But as much social science research and writing by Malcolm Gladwell, among others, make clear, the rules are mostly created by those already in power so obtaining power often entails standing out and breaking rules and social conventions.

Profits are related to customer retention. Customer retention is related to employee retention. Employee retention may or may not be related to benefits, but benefits could be part of the package that causes people to stay and -- by the way -- engage in discretionary effort. .. If you go into any organization that's customer-facing, you can tell in five minutes when the employees are feeling abused. They retaliate on the customers.

You can't be normal and expect abnormal returns.

You are more likely to acquire power by narrowing your focus and applying your energies, like the sun's rays, to a limited range of activities in a small number of domains.

To become "memorable" do things that are somewhat unexpected. Dress, or talk, in ways that draw attention. And mostly, don't follow all the "rule for behavior" so closely.

Consider the many financial industry executives who walked away with many millions as their organizations failed - I think the expression is "failing upward." People also need to understand that their "technical" job performance is correlated with their career success, but again, many other factors such as educational credentials, length of service, and yes, political skills, also contribute to success. So people need to understand business and technical issues but they also need to master organizational dynamics.

Take care of your customers, and you will have a successful business. Don't, and you won't. The airlines need to figure this out - soon.

Point at solutions instead of at each other.

Today, if the CEO thinks it's a good idea, it's done everywhere; if the CEO thinks it's a bad idea, it's done nowhere. We ought to be more agnostic and open to learning things that we didn't expect - and the only way to do that is to try things and be open-minded about how well they are working. And third, evidence-based management involves reading and learning - just like doctors do - and to do so not just in school but afterward, as well.

We need to reexamine and reassess the purpose of the corporation, and go back to the idea that senior leadership has responsibilities not just to shareholders but also to customers and employees.

I decided to write Leadership BS because I was irritated by the hypocrisy in the leadership literature and the fact that many of the people writing leadership books exhibited behavior that was precisely the opposite of what they advocated and also what they claimed they did. Stories did not seem to be a good foundation on which to build a science of leadership.

One way to feel good about oneself is to not fail. The easiest way to not fail is to not try in the first place. So, I see lots of people give up before they start. That way they don't have to face uncomfortable failures. They can sort of "remain on the sideline while the game is going on." While this may make people feel good about themselves, it won't get them any power or success. As any successful salesperson will tell you, if you haven't been rejected, you haven't tried enough with enough people.

Volumes in the series on Lyndon Johnson, including Master of the Senate and The Path Power, describe how Johnson created resources out of nothing and built a substantial power base.

Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.

Leaders are not modest, and more importantly, the extensive social science research on narcissism, self-promotion, and similar constructs shows that these qualities and behaviors are useful for getting hired, achieving promotions, keeping one's job, and obtaining a higher salary.

We need economic policies in the U.S. that produce jobs, first of all, but good jobs, second of all. Believe it or not, Germany, a country characterized by high wages, strong unions, a social safety net, and so forth is the second largest exporter (after China) in the world. The idea that the only way to succeed is by eliminating vacations, sick days, worker protections, and so forth is simply belied by the competitiveness rankings produced by the Economist magazine's intelligence unit and by the World Economic Forum.

The class focuses intensely on making people more comfortable with doing a wider range of things - such as networking, self-promotion, building their own personal brand, cleverly acquiring resources, getting known - that they may have been less comfortable with before.

People, to maintain their self-esteem, tend to believe they are above average on all positive qualities - height, income, intelligence, sense of humor, negotiating ability, you name it. The problem is that if we are going to really build our skills, we need to know which skills are most deficient. So, I advise people to find confidantes to tell them the truth. And then act on that knowledge to build the abilities they need to be more successful.