55 essential ideas to help smart people

The rules of business: 55 essential ideas to help smart people (and organizations) perform at their best / by Fast company's editors and writers, and Paul B. Brown. (New York : Doubleday, 2005).

illuminating quotes from famous or important figures in different fields.

Chapter 1 - Change
#1 The first rule of business is the same as the first rule of life: Adapt or die.
#2 Innovation is difficult and often painful. But there is no alternative. (See Rule 1: Adapt or die.)
#3 When should you initiate change? When things are going perfectly.
#4 Regardless of how realistic you think you are being, the change process will take three times as long as you like.

Chapter 2 - Communication
#5 Employees need to know—in painstaking detail—what you want to do and why. They need to hear it again and again. Don’t forget: It’s impossible for them to hear it too often.
#6 If you can’t communicate, you can’t lead.
#7 If you can’t get your message across quickly, you aren’t going to get it across at all.

Chapter 3: Creativity and Innovation
#8 Nothing is more overrated than a new idea. Ideas by themselves are worthless. It’s what you do with them that matters.
#9 If your cool new product or service doesn’t generate enough money to cover costs and make a profit, it isn’t innovation, it’s art. If you covet awards, go to Hollywood.
#10 Make innovation pay its way. Business units should have to fund the research they want, instead of receiving a handout from corporate. Having to pay for it is a sure way to guarantee that the research is going to be focused.

Chapter 4: Customer Service
#11 In the proverbial 10 words or less, here is the key to customer service: Ask customers what they want, and give it to them.

Chapter 5: Decision Making
#12 “No” is the second best answer you can get to any question you ask.
#13 Not deciding is a decision. That’s the problem with procrastinating.
#14 It is extremely hard to make a list of all the things you haven’t thought of. That explains why it is important to open up the decision-making process to as many people as possible.

Chapter 6: Welcome to the Design Revolution
#15 Design will be the next place companies battle for competitive advantage.
#16 Yes, it is important to be innovative, eye-catching, and fun. But if consumers can’t easily use your design, they won’t buy your product.

Chapter 7: Execute!
#17 If you don’t execute, you won’t accomplish a thing.
#18 Hold people accountable. Reward those who execute. Coach those who don’t. And if they still don’t get it, fire them. You aren’t helping them, or the organization, by having them stick around.

Chapter 8: Hiring and Developing and Retaining Great Employees
#19 No matter how overwhelmed you are with work, it is always better to hire no one than to hire the wrong person.It sounds so basic, but the rule is violated every day everywhere—with disastrous results.
#20 A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you’re only two generations away from death.
#21 If you lose great people, you lose success. It’s that simple.

Chapter 9: Technology Is Not a Strategy
#22Technology is not the answer. It can enable and support the corporate vision, but by itself, technology will not give you a competitive advantage.
#23Operational silos are bad anywhere. But they are especially crippling when it comes to information technology (IT), which is vital to almost every organization’s success.

Chapter 10: Knowledge
#24 Don’t have your people waste time figuring out what someone else in the company has already discovered. Create and maintain an efficient knowledge management system to share experiences companywide.
#25 Data are a series of facts. Information is a lot of data about a topic combined with some context. Ideally companies want to manage information in such a way that it yields knowledge: information that has been processed in such a way that it can be used for competitive advantage.

Chapter 11: Leadership
#26 The principles governing how you lead must remain absolutely constant. How you express them must vary every single time, depending on your audience. You need to make sure they understand what you are trying to do—and what their role is.
#27 Leaders lead.
#28 Leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want because they want to.
#29 Leaders need to say two things: “This is where we are going,” and “This is why we need you to help us get there.”

Chapter 12: Life and Career
#30 Achieving balance in your life is a time-management problem and needs to be treated as such. What that means is you figure out what you absolutely must accomplish in your personal and professional lives, and let everything else slide.
#31 You can do anything, but not everything.
#32 Take breaks. Not only will it make you more productive, if you go out and see the world you are bound to spot opportunities.

Chapter 13: Managing
#33 Great managers are just as important as great leaders.
#34 The closer top management is to the customer, the more successfuI an organization is Iikely to be.
#35 Your employees are never going to know how they are doing—and how they can do better—unless you tell them.

Chapter 14: Marketing
#36 Nothing happens in business until the customer says yes.
#37 If the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it is bad dog food. Period. Similarly, if customers won’t buy your product or service, you are not giving them what they either want or need. It’s your fault, not theirs.
#38 Every communication with a customer must answer the two questions that they always have (even if they don’t always express them to you): “What do you have and why should I care?”
#39 Our three rules of advertising: Don’t insult us, tell the truth, and have a sense of humor. Violate these rules at your own peril.

Chapter 15: The Organization and Corporate Culture
#40 We get the kind of organization we deserve.
#41 If you have a senior vice president of administration, something is terribly wrong. You shouldn’t need a bureaucracy to manage thebureaucracy. In fact, you shouldn’t have a bureaucracy at all.
#42 Ultimately, everything is personal.

Chapter 16: Teamwork and Partnerships
#43 The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If not, you have a serious management challenge on your hands.
#44 In well-run companies, everyone is needed but no one is indispensable. In other words, teamwork is built in.
#45 Just because everyone wears the same uniform does not mean they are a team.

Chapter 17: Risk
#46 Let us edit a long-standing cliché: No prudent risk, no fairly predictable rewards.

Chapter 18: Social Responsibility, Trust, and Ethics
#47 You can’t be a little bit ethical. Either you are ethical or you are not. There is no in-between.
#48 Everybody must understand and internalize the company’s core values. Doing so frees up time, because you don’t have to debate the organization’s core beliefs. Everyone knows what they are. It also frees resources. When people know what they are supposed to do, they need less supervision.
#49 If it is not right, don’t do it; if it is not true, don’t say it.

Chapter 19: Speed
#50 In today’s economy, it’s the fast companies that trounce the slow.
#51 Look to streamline your operation everywhere. The cumulative effect can be astonishing.
#52 Just because you occasionally step on the accelerator doesn’t mean you can keep it floored indefinitely. Organizations can run flat out only for short periods.

Chapter 20: Strategy and Growth
#53 If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. You need a clear strategy and a clear direction, one that everyone in the organization understands as well as you do.
#54 As IBM’s Tom Watson would say: Think!

Chapter 21: The Link Between Success and Failure
#55 If you haven’t had one spectacular failure in your life, you haven’t tried hard enough.