10 Quotes on Operational Excellence

I've been super busy last week, so instead of a weekly essay, enjoy ten quotes from my book on operational excellence:

1. "Good managers recognize guilt or shame as a signal that they haven’t set clear, individual, and rewardable objectives."
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2. "The opposite of micromanagement isn’t good management but a lack of management."
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3. "Culture is not a set of concepts; it’s a track record of which behaviors lead to personal gain and which are wasted effort.[...] Culture is changed by changing the track record."
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4. "The manager’s role is not to actively motivate employees, but to prevent demotivation by ensuring fairness and consistent attention. Their focus is on avoiding motivational losses."
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5. "People need reminders, not because in their absence they forget, but because in their absence, they believe their content doesn’t matter anymore."
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6. "A Weekly Meeting is ineffective if attendees leave in the same position they were when they arrived. It is effective when they leave with a clearer, more actionable to-do list than when they entered."
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7. "If [during one-on-ones] the manager properly focuses on gathering intelligence, reinforcing priorities, and unlocking progress rather than micro-managing, subordinates will, within a few weeks, begin to look forward to weekly one-on-one meetings."
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8. "Problems grow to the size they need for us to acknowledge them. An organization that is slow in acknowledging problems will find itself with big problems."
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9. "Good managers shrink the scope of change to one location at a time so that they have the necessary bandwidth to pressure the adoption within a critical mass until the new behavior is self-sustaining."
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10. "Change can only be driven by those close to the people being changed: their direct managers."

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