“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”
André Gide, French writer, “The Immoralist”


“The statistics on implementing strategy are abysmal. Seven out of ten organizations fail to execute strategies. It’s not that they have bad strategies it’s just that they can’t execute.”

David Norton, co-creator of The Balanced Scorecard

“Mike Smith did a meta-analysis in 2002, which is, in consulting terms, a study of studies. He looked at 49 global studies across consulting firms, public and private companies, and looked at the reported success rates of the executives sponsoring those changes. He found five buckets or categories of change consistently across organizations, and these are global organizations of all sizes. The rates reported ranged from 28% to a high of 60%.”
Richard Roi, Right Management’s regional practice leader

“Although it may have looked like a single-stroke breakthrough to those peering in from the outside, it was anything but that to people experiencing the transformation from within. Rather, it was a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and them simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel.”
Jim Collins, Good to Great

“Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last.”
Jack William Nicklaus, American golfer, won 17 major tournaments

“Examining close to 100 cases, we found that most people did not handle large-scale change well, that they made predictable mistakes, and that they made these mistakes mostly because they had little exposure to highly successful transformations.”
John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen, The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

“Every few years we rediscover formal planning, then we rediscover the importance of people, and then in another few years we discover cost control. When you look over the last forty or fifty years there is nothing much that is genuinely new. It is a recycling and elaboration of something that has been proposed as far back as Plato.”
Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management