Quality Leadership: The Key to Quality Management

According to American-Romanian quality pioneer Joseph M. Juran, the significant factors that have aided first-rate organizations realize their top-quality positions are all leadership related: The chief executives personally led the quality initiative. They trained the entire managerial hierarchy in managing for quality. They enlarged the business plan to include strategic quality goals. The goals included […]

Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Talent

In the bestselling The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, New York University-academic and business analyst Scott Galloway offers a amendment to the cliched follow-your-passion career advice: Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don’t have […]

Kids Who Are Different

“Kids Who Are Different”—A poem by English-born actor Digby Wolfe: Here’s to the kids who are different,The kids who don’t always get A’sThe kids who have ears twice the size of their peers,And noses that go on for days … Here’s to the kids who are different,The kids they call crazy or dumb,The kids who don’t […]

Unchangeables and Changeables of Human Nature

Few leaders have exemplified and towered over their countries as Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore. The city-state’s founder and long-time leader stated at his 60th birthday dinner in 1983, What have I learned since 1973? Some more basic unchangeables about human beings and human societies, the ways in which they can be made to […]

Management by Objectives

Peter Drucker introduced the idea of Management by Objectives and Self-Control (MbO) as all encompassing management concept, which he set in context in The Practice of Management: The word ‘philosophy’ is tossed around with happy abandon these days in management circles [to create effect to mask the lack of substance]. But management by objectives and […]

G. K. Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, the most influential 20th-century playwright, indisputably can claim the distinction as the best English dramatist ever since Shakespeare. The English writer, poet, and philosopher G. K. Chesterton wrote about Bernard Shaw in his essays Shaw the Puritan, He is a daring pilgrim who set out from the grave to find the cradle. […]

How We Lose Our High Aspirations

John Stuart Mill in his celebrated book Utilitarianism, Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has […]

Understand Your Assumptions

From Peter Drucker’s The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization, My friend Philip Kotler, a professor at Northwestern University, points out that many organizations are very clear about the value they would like to deliver, but they often don’t understand that value from the perspective of their customers. They make […]

The Tenderness of Compassion

Tara Brach writes in Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love That Heals Fear and Shame Within Us: To cultivate the tenderness of compassion, we not only stop running away from suffering, we deliberately bring our attention to it. Buddhist compassion practices usually begin with being aware of our own pain because once our hearts are tender […]

Not Doing Anything

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche in the article Do Nothing from the Winter 2009 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review: Meditation is one of the rare occasions when we’re not doing anything. Otherwise, we’re always doing something, we’re always thinking something, we’re always occupied. We get lost in millions of obsessions or fixations. But by meditating […]