Harvard Business Review Quotes

Organizations can't change their culture unless individual employees change their behavior - and changing behavior is hard. ~ Keith Ferrazzi

My favorite magazine is the 'Harvard Business Review.' If someone sat across from me in a restaurant and didn't know me, that might surprise them. ~ Sophia Amoruso

Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow's distinction, today. ~ ~ Onyi Anyado

You cannot pursue all your goals simultaneously or satisfy all your desires at once. And it's an emotional drain to think you can. Instead, you must focus on long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities. ~ Eric C. Sinoway

Disengaged employees are an unfortunate reality in the workplace, and poor leadership is often to blame. ~ W.Chan Kim

The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. Interestingly enough, those new practices eventually sow the seeds of their own decay and lead to another period of revolution. Managers, therefore, experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period. ~ Larry Greiner

Yet of the countless articles, books and so-called lifehacks about productivity I've read (or written!), the only "trick" that has ever truly and consistently worked is both the simplest and the most difficult to master: just getting started.

Enter micro-progress.

Pardon the gimmicky phrase, but the idea goes like this: For any task you have to complete, break it down into the smallest possible units of progress and attack them one at a time.
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My favorite expansion of this concept is in this post by James Clear.

In it, he uses Newton's laws of motion as analogies for productivity. To wit, rule No. 1: "Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes."
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And it's not just gimmicky phrases and so-called lifehacking: Studies have shown that you can trick your brain into increasing dopamine levels by setting and achieving, you guessed it, micro-goals.

Going even further, success begets success. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, researchers reported finding that "ordinary, incremental progress can increase people's engagement in the work and their happiness during the workday. ~ Tim Herrera

Everyone Who Makes It Has a Mentor" was the title of the classic 1978 Harvard Business Review ~ Ellen A. Ensher

Entrepreneur, with the growth of social media and the global market now local, now is the time to grow your leadership brand. ~ Onyi Anyado

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon's founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old "gatekeepers" of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. "Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation," Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. "When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say 'that will never work!' And guess what - many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. ~ Brad Stone

When we start a new venture, we base it on hard research and analysis. Typically, we review the industry and put ourselves in our customer's shoes to see what we could do better. ~ Richard Branson

Governor Romney has a great business background. He is extremely well educated. He has several degrees from Harvard, including, you know, business and including a law degree. ~ Clint Eastwood

Seeing the way leadership works in the real world is a tad more enlightening than reading case studies as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. ~ Jeetendr Sehdev

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. ~ Steve Jobs

Managers who aspire to be ethical must challenge the assumption that they're always unbiased and acknowledge that vigilance, even more than good intention, is a defining characteristic of an ethical manager. ~ Harvard Business School Press

Your career growth depends mainly on how well you can articulate and present your performance review. ~ Abhishek Ratna

I just went to Harvard a little while, because I graduated from Armstrong High School in Washington and then I went up there but I didn't stay that long because I went into show business. ~ Billy Eckstine

To finish first you have to first finish. Don't get in a position where you go back to go. What's interesting is that some guy whose grandfather was a lawyer and a judge-hurriedly going to Harvard Law with a wave of veterans-I was willing to go into so many different businesses. I was constantly going right into the other fellow's business and doing better than the other fellow did. The reason it was possible? Self-education- developing mental discipline, big ideas that really work. ~ Charlie Munger

I think it's important to present yourself as a professional. While writing a good book is critical, nothing will cancel that out faster than behaving like an amateur. I cringe every time I see an author arguing with a reader who left a poor review, or fighting with their friends on Facebook … or publicly bashing their agents or publishers. ~ Alistair Cross

The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

I took a job at the Walt Disney Company and after 18 months decided to go to business school at Harvard. I was awestruck by the campus. My first reaction was 'I don't belong here.' Then I said, 'I'm here; let's get on with it.' ~ Jason Kilar

I actually went on lectures at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and all the business schools eight years ago, explaining what the implications were and how the platforms could be powerful in creating the narrative of your brand and mobilizing your life so that you become humanized as well. I understood that and thought that was really empowering, not only to artists, but to brands as well and in general. ~ MC Hammer

It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School. ~ John Harvey-Jones

Mentally imagine you are buying the business or applying for the job that will earn your fortune. Review each step you'd take, the obstacles you might meet, the difficulties you would meet. Continue imagining each step until you mentally reach your wealth goal. ~ Tyler Gregory Hicks

I've lectured at the Harvard Business School several times. ~ Christie Hefner

You have quite a way with animals."

"They're my business," she said, as if she needed to explain her delight.

"You're good at it. That's obvious."

"I like helping animals. It makes me feel . . . useful, I guess."

"Maybe you could show me what you do sometime."

Tess cocked her head at him. "Do you have a pet?"

Dante should have said no, but he was still picturing her with those two ridiculous furballs and wishing that he could bring her some of that same joy. "I keep a dog. Like those."

"You do? What's its name?"

Dante cleared his throat, mentally casting about for what he might call a useless creature that depended on him for survival. "Harvard," he drawled, his lips curving with private humor. "I call it Harvard."

"Well, I'd love to meet him sometime, Dante." A chilly breeze kicked up, and Tess shivered, rubbing her arms. "It's getting kind of late. I should probably think about heading home."

"Yeah, sure." Dante nodded, kicking himself for making up a pet, for God's sake, just because it might win him some favor with Tess. ~ Lara Adrian

We tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy - note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the United States we have the great Harvard Business School, but America is the country with the greatest debt in the world. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

For example, Shawn Cole, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds that Indian state-owned banks increase their lending to the politically important but relatively poor constituency of farmers by about 5 to 10 percentage points in election years.51 The effect is most pronounced in districts with close elections. The consequences of the lending are greater loan defaults and no measurable increase in agricultural output, which suggest that it really serves as a costly form of income redistribution. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind. ~ Clayton Christensen

Articulate each meeting's purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan's legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM's industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century. ~ Harvard Business School Press

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist. ~ P. Chidambaram

Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in a simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Do an evening review at the end of the day to reflect on what went well, and what you'd do differently next time. ~ Marilyn Suttle

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business. ~ Fred Wilson

Renowned psychologist David McClelland of Harvard wrote about three basic motivators in people's work: need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power. Most successful business professionals' scores on these three motivations form something of a checkmark. They tend to be moderately highly motivated by a need for achievement, not much motivated by need for affiliation, and highly motivated by a need for power. The meritocrat, by contrast, is very highly oriented toward achievement, moderately highly motivated by need for affiliation, and almost negatively motivated by need for power. That ~ James Waldroop

It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history. ~ Malcolm Forbes

I moved back to Boston and joined some of my Harvard classmates at Bain & Co. I quickly realized I enjoyed business. ~ Kenneth Chenault

She built a close-knit team of talented people who bonded with one another and felt passion for the mission. Soon her group became one of the parent bank's most desirable places to work. She developed strong relationships with senior executives who helped her deal with tensions in the middle, and she communicated well and often about why her unit needed to be different. Her creativity, vision, teamwork, and persistence helped this group succeed and become a national role model, while other banks' efforts faltered. ~ Harvard Business School Press

PALATABLE CRITICISM: In a performance review, don't offer more than three criticisms. That's all an employee can digest. ~ Nancy Humphries

The time I have already spent at Harvard has been a stimulating experience, and I look forward to developing my relationship and activities with the students, faculty and friends of the Harvard Business School community. ~ Alex Ferguson

Sometimes i feel that i am unlucky due to couldn't enroll in the Harvard Business School but at least by this encouragement that i enrolled in MBA in Human resource management program whereas i grown as a leader and build the team in the field of HRM through motivation. ~ Avinash Advani

Under the school's disclosure rules, about 1,600 of 8,900 professors and lecturers at Harvard Medical School have reported to the dean that they or a family member had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research, or clinical care.2 When professors publicly pass drug recommendations off as academic knowledge, we have a serious problem. ~ Dan Ariely

I sat down with my long time business partner and Rap-A-Lot CEO James Prince to review the music that we had and quickly came up with an outstanding track list. 'The Epilogue' is the perfect opportunity to release some great material to the fans and a proper final chapter for the Trill-ogy. Good music is timeless. ~ Bun B.

Sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

To review briefly, in the late 1960s, men got paid more than women (usually double) for doing the exact same job. Women could get credit cards in their husband's names but not their own, and many divorced, single and separated women could not get cards at all. Women could not get mortgages on their own and if a couple applied for a mortgage, only the husband's income was considered. Women faced widespread and consistent discrimination in education, scholarship awards, and on the job. In most states the collective property of a marriage was legally the husband's since the wife had allegedly not contributed to acquiring it. Women were largely kept out of a whole host of jobs--doctor, college professor, bus driver, business manager--that women today take for granted. They were knocked out in the delivery room... once women got pregnant they were either fired from their jobs or expected to quit. If they were women of color, it was worse on all fronts--work education, health care. (And talk about slim pickings. African American men were being sent to prison and cut out of jobs by the millions.) Most women today, having seen reruns of The Brady Bunch and Father Knows Best, and having heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the bestseller that attacked women's confinement to the home, are all too familiar with the idealized yet suffocating media images of happy, devoted housewives. In fact, most of us have learned to laugh at them, vacuuming in their stockings and heels, clu ~ Susan J. Douglas

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students - Mark Zuckerberg's first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don't even appear to be business opportunities at ~ Peter Thiel

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'

Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as "karmic reassignment") manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'

I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place. ~ Robert Galbraith

Great leaders rise out of adversity. ~ Harvard Business School Press

What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great. ~ Harvard Business School Press

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men. ~ Georges F. Doriot