A Quote by Chris Gardner
Salespeople are the most important people in any organization. Until a salesperson gets an order, nobody in the company has a job.
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Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
The Unsuccessful Salesperson says, the other guy has the best territory. The Successful Salesperson says, every territory is the best one. The Unsuccessful Salesperson says, that company will never buy. The Successful Salesperson says, I can make that company buy.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.
You simply can't be tentative in a startup. You have to go for it at every chance you get. And if the leader of the organization is anxious, his or her fear pervades the organization. Everything comes from the top in a company. So if you are starting a company or building one, face your fears and move past them. It's critically important to your company.
If you think 20 years out and ask what's the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn't have a name.
A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness. When company organization is reviewed, or when reorganizing a company, it must be loked upon as a whole, as a total system.
No organization engaged in any specific field of work ever invents any important developers in that field, or adopts any important development in that field until forced to do so by outside competition.
For any young people looking for job opportunities, good grades and academic results are important, but what is more important may be showing you are someone who has the drive and capability and can fit in the company culture.
I have observed several hundred salespeople who were taught to use deceptive practices like 'bait and switch' and encouraged to play negotiation games with customers. They were so stressed by this behavior that they suffered from a high incidence of alcohol and substance abuse, divorce, job-jumping, and low productivity. In the same industry, I have observed countless people who had been taught to sell with high integrity. Ironically, their customer satisfaction, profit margins, and salesperson retention were significantly higher.
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.
People ask me what's the most important function when you're starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
Nobody gets to say who we love, or who we lay down beside, or take as our husband, lover, life, or bride. Nobody gets to decide what's for some, that others should hide. Pride. Nobody gets to choose but YOU.
The most important ingredient for the success of any company is the quality of its people, starting with its leadership team.
The two most important things in any company do not appear in its balance sheet: its reputation and its people.
Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
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