During my younger years & career, I learned many quotes from individuals and / or websites that triggered me or made me think twice. As I didn’t want to forget some quotes, I started writing them down. These quotes can hopefully also trigger you, to think differently, which of course is strongly linked to my why.
Please read the quotes below, and use them in cases of recognition. It can be very strong to use quotes to reflect for a moment in (fierce) discussions / dialogues, consultations or as an explanation. It could make people think and possibly “come back to earth”.
I have tried to link the quotes to a certain topic, but in some cases a quote can also connect to several topics.
Leaderschip:
- No method is more effective than a good example (Ingvar Kamprad)
- It does not make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do, it does make sense to hire smart people to tell you what to do with all your running ideas (Steve Jobs)
- When we tell people to do their job, we get workers. When we trust people to get the job done, we get leaders (Simon Sinek)
- A team is not a group of people who work together, a team is a group of people who trust each other (Simon Sinek)
- True leaders pull the thumb, before they point the finger. They pass the credit and take the blame (Ron Gibori)
- Blaming someone else is the best possible way to keep problems alive (OmDenken.nl)
- Never blame the people, always blame the process first (W. Edwards Deming)
- Leadership is not about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those in your charge (Simon Sinek)
- Real leaders aren’t focused on their own success, they want to see everyone in their team succeed (Simon Sinek)
- It is not your title that makes you a leader. It is your influence, inspiration & initiative (John C. Maxwell)
- Give recognition to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so others may gain instead of a bonus to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain (Simon Sinek)
- Coaching means having patience (read: take & make time) & not taking over (read: create room for failure) (LEAN thinking)
- Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to be a man of value (Albert Einstein)
- Your value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth (Zig Ziglar)
- Good employees quit when management is bad, bad employees quit when management is good (Peter F. Drucker)
Change:
- Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress, working hard for something we love is called passion (Simon Sinek)
- People are afraid of big changes, but usually embrace little ones. The best thing about little ones is they add up to one big one (Simon Sinek)
- The fear for change is mostly bigger then the change itself (Anton Overpelt)
- Scepsis is the most effective way to learn nothing new (Sir Laurence Gardner)
- The most contra intuitive LEAN principle is going faster by going slower (LEAN thinking)
- It’s better to go slowly in the right direction than go speeding off in the wrong direction (Simon Sinek)
- You’re overcomplicating it, just start trying. See what works, adapt as you go. Imperfect action always beats perfect inaction (LinkedIn)
- If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward (Martin Luther King Jr.)
- We can’t say when the culture will be what it should be and we can’t look back and tell anyone the date it changed, but we will know. It’s like ‘knowing’ when we started loving each other (Simon Sinek)
- Hoping for change without doing something yourself is like waiting for a boat to pass at a train station (OmDenken.nl)
- You often need someone else to discover your own blind spots (Kaizen Institute)
- Grass doesn’t grow by pulling it, it grows by watering the roots (African proverb)
- A goal without a plan is nothing more than a wish (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Money is not the goal, money is the fuel (Simon Sinek)
- Standards are the basis for maintenance & improvement. Without, there can’t be any (Masaaki Imai / Taiichi Ohno)
- You can have the best standards in the world, but if they’re not consistently put into practice by people, they’re useless (BRC Global standards)
- We measure to improve, not to prove (Arjen Hoekzema)
- Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first (Simon Sinek)
Choices:
- The secret to success is 2 words, ‘right decisions’. How to make right decisions is only by experience and experience will be retrieved by making ‘wrong decisions’ (OmDenken.nl)
- It’s not all about making the right decision, it is about making the best of the decisions you take (John Kramer)
- In weak companies politics win, in strong companies right decisions / ideas do (Steve Jobs)
- Cost is more important than quality, but quality is the best way to reduce cost (Genichi Taguchi)
- He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes, but he who never asks a question remains a fool forever (Chinese proverb)
- A bad system / tool will always beat a good person (W. Edwards Deming)
- Our choices reveal our intentions (Simon sinke)
Time:
- Too busy to improve (Google.com)
- No time does not exist, no priority does (“Loesje”)
- Everyone has time for everything, it’s just a matter of priority (Alen Huskanović)
- There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which shouldn’t be done at all (Peter F. Drucker)
- Give people enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing (Warren Buffet)
- What’s important, is hardly ever urgent and what’s urgent, is hardly ever important (Dwight Eisenhower)
- Lack of planning on your side does not have to mean importance on my side (William Bouffard)
Problems:
- When you have a problem and you also tend to think only you can solve it, you actually have 2 problems (OmDenken.nl)
- The first step in fixing a problem, is knowing it exists or what the problem is (Zig Zigler)
- You can’t solve a problem with the same way of thinking in which the problem occurred (Albert Einstein)
- Who ever wants to run, first needs to learn to run (Patrick Latt)
- You’d rather have everyone solving small problems (Kaizens) daily than only 3 individuals performing 3 projects a year (LEAN thinking)
- Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you… (Anne Lamott)
- So many times, the root cause of a problem is that there is no standard (OmDenken.nl)
