If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. (Location 106)
When products and services become largely indistinguishable from each other, all there is by the way of competitive advantage is time. (Location 108)
know-how managers are sources of knowledge, skills, and understanding to people around them in an organization. They are specialists and experts of some sort who act as consultants to other members of the organization; they are, in effect, nodes in a loosely defined network of information. Teachers, market researchers, computer mavens, and traffic engineers shape the work of others through their know-how just as much as or more than the traditional manager using supervisory authority. (Location 144)
“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.” (Location 165)
The second idea is that the work of a business, of a government bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams. (Location 181)
The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence. (Location 183)
High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage. (Location 187)
A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in (Location 188)
So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage. (Location 220)
You must compete with millions of individuals every day, and every day you must enhance your value, hone your competitive advantage, learn, adapt, get out of the way, move from job to job, even from industry to industry if you must and retrench if you need to do so in order to start again. The key task is to manage your career so that you do not become a casualty. (Location 228)
From my own experience at Intel, I strongly believe that applying the methods of production, exercising managerial leverage, and eliciting an athlete’s desire for peak performance can help nearly everyone—lawyers, teachers, engineers, supervisors, even book editors; in short, middle managers of all kinds—to work more productively. (Location 245)
A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence. (Location 288)
“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else. (Location 295)