Business Insight for MBAs and Managers

Quotations

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Most Recent Business Quotations

If you want to maximize someone’s satisfaction with a choice, don’t give them unlimited options. Instead, as my colleagues and I have shown, you should give them some choice but with clear constraints. This added structure is crucial for picking a desired option with confidence.
— Sheena S. Iyengar

Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

While history would like you to believe breakthroughs are the result of genius inspiration, or divine intervention, the truth is far more prosaic. Whether it’s the invention of basketball or an organization-wide system for learning and innovation, our greatest minds have arrived at their Eureka! moments by way of clever choosing. That is, they identified their big problem, broke it down into several subproblems, searched … [ Read more ]
— Sheena S. Iyengar

Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Psychologists have identified more than 60 cognitive biases that affect how people make decisions. We boiled them down into four groups: group think; confirmation bias; loss aversion, which leads us to put more weight on losses than gains; and anchoring or inertia—anchoring decisions in what we did in the past.
— Tim Koller

Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Public companies are often not set up for innovation, partly because their compensation systems tend to be short-term-oriented and because the boards aren’t deeply enough involved in innovation. […] We’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the past 20 years, but a lot of it has come from younger, newer companies. Despite all the talent, capital, and customer knowl­edge established corporations have, there … [ Read more ]
— Tim Koller

Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

Many perceive the markets as short-term oriented, forcing management to worry only about quarterly earnings. Our research shows that successful companies are typically those with longer-term horizons. There are plenty of investors who have long-term horizons as well, but they generally need to talk to a company only once or twice a year to make their decisions. Short-term investors are noisier. They probably drive the … [ Read more ]
— Tim Koller

Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Most Popular Business Quotations

In principle, patents open up innovations in two ways. First, they confer only temporary rights; once patents expire or are abandoned, the intellectual property they are designed to protect passes into the public domain. Second, they require the details of the invention to be disclosed so they can be replicated. This permits follow-on innovation, which is essential for industrial progress. More recently, as the patent system … [ Read more ]
— The Economist

As for the genius of innovation, clearly the one percent spark of inspiration is nurtured by a positive culture. But the 99 percent perspiration ingredient comes from employees who love what they do, as well as where they do it, and who invest in that Holy Grail of productivity called “discretionary … [ Read more ]
— Stephanie Quappe, David Samso Aparici, Jon Warshawsky

Money never comes first in self-expression of any kind.
— William J. Reilly

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no … [ Read more ]
— Theodore Roosevelt

The uncomfortable fact for many green marketers--and targets of that marketing--is that genuinely going green would mean giving up most of the products and services that clutter our consumer culture. It would mean simplifying, valuing time and people over stuff. How can most products avoid the sin of the hidden trade-off? With a simple label: "You don't really need this."
— David Roberts

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Accounting   [16 posts]
Best Practices   [39 posts]
Career   [157 posts]   → Networking [2 posts]   → Work [47 posts]
Change Management   [144 posts]
Competitive Intelligence   [11 posts]
Consulting / Analytical Tools   [4 posts]
Corporate Governance   [99 posts]   → Succession Planning [4 posts]
Customer Related   [169 posts]
Economics   [289 posts]   → Capitalism [71 posts]
Education   [35 posts]
Entrepreneurship   [177 posts]   → Venture Capital [31 posts]
Finance   [121 posts]   → Investing [9 posts]   → Market/Investment [5 posts]   → Money [9 posts]   → Taxation [1 posts]
General   [6 posts]
History   [19 posts]
Human Resources   [500 posts]   → Coaching [9 posts]   → Compensation [39 posts]   → Diversity [39 posts]   → Motivation [94 posts]   → Training & Development [62 posts]   → Hiring [33 posts]
Innovation   [309 posts]   → Creativity [66 posts]
International   [52 posts]   → International - Americas [1 posts]   → Trade [2 posts]
IT / Technology / E-Business   [73 posts]
Leadership   [511 posts]
Legal   [23 posts]   → Intellectual Property [10 posts]
Management   [1487 posts]   → Business Plans [12 posts]   → Business Rules [43 posts]   → Delegation [7 posts]   → Execution [24 posts]   → Goals [24 posts]   → Growth [7 posts]   → Knowledge Management [12 posts]   → Measurement [45 posts]   → Mission [26 posts]   → Process [16 posts]   → Project Management [11 posts]   → Success / Failure [171 posts]   → Trends / Analysis [52 posts]   → Values [27 posts]   → Vision [37 posts]
Marketing / Sales   [282 posts]   → Advertising [9 posts]   → Brand [24 posts]   → Business Development [2 posts]   → Market Research [26 posts]   → Pricing [6 posts]
MBA Related   [39 posts]
Mergers & Acquisitions   [26 posts]
Miscellaneous   [82 posts]
Negotiation   [19 posts]
Nonprofit   [4 posts]
Operations   [43 posts]   → Outsourcing / BPO [14 posts]   → Quality [5 posts]
Organizational Behavior   [1605 posts]   → Accountability [20 posts]   → Bureaucracy [14 posts]   → Communication [157 posts]   → Culture [102 posts]   → Decision Making [176 posts]   → Ethics [57 posts]   → Personality / Behavior [241 posts]   → Politics [10 posts]   → Power / Authority [47 posts]   → Reengineering [3 posts]   → Reorganization [4 posts]   → Storytelling [27 posts]   → Teamwork [54 posts]   → Trust [31 posts]   → Women in Business [24 posts]
People   [7 posts]
Personal Development   [535 posts]   → Ability [23 posts]   → Achievement [85 posts]   → Attitude [21 posts]   → Challenge [11 posts]   → Character [20 posts]   → Commitment [13 posts]   → Competence [12 posts]   → Experience [25 posts]   → Expertise [12 posts]   → Judgement [7 posts]   → Learning [71 posts]
Productivity / Work Tips   [30 posts]   → Products & Services [1 posts]
Prospective   [1 post]   → About the MBA Degree [1 post]
Public Relations   [15 posts]   → Crisis Management [6 posts]
Quote   [642 posts]   → Action [23 posts]   → Adversity [11 posts]   → Ambition [10 posts]   → Attention [20 posts]   → Confidence [8 posts]   → Design [8 posts]   → Fear / Doubt [8 posts]   → Future [35 posts]   → Government [17 posts]   → Information [48 posts]   → Integrity [16 posts]   → Intelligence [12 posts]   → Knowledge [110 posts]   → Life [50 posts]   → Luck [17 posts]   → Mistakes [7 posts]   → Observations [10 posts]   → Opportunity [26 posts]   → Perception [15 posts]   → Persuasion [27 posts]   → Philosophy [8 posts]   → Potential [7 posts]   → Preparation [9 posts]   → Privacy [1 posts]   → Problems / Solutions [39 posts]   → Progress [10 posts]   → Reputation [6 posts]   → Skills [18 posts]   → Teaching [7 posts]   → Thought [96 posts]   → Time Management [16 posts]   → Wisdom [58 posts]
Risk Management   [69 posts]
Social Responsibility (ESG)   [94 posts]
Statistics   [12 posts]
Strategy   [367 posts]   → Business Model [3 posts]   → Competition [55 posts]   → Planning [21 posts]

Browse Business Quotations by Industry

Automotive   [1 post]
Consulting   [2 posts]
Education / Training   [4 posts]
Investing   [2 posts]
Retail   [1 post]