Quotes by Harold Geneen

• The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success: Concentration, Discrimination, Organization, Innovation and Communication.
• Management must manage!
• Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.
• Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.
• You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory.
• Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Nonperformance can always be explained away.
• The best way to inspire people to superior performance is to convince them by everything you do and by your everyday attitude that you are wholeheartedly supporting them.
• Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented.
• The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
• Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process.
• We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.
• You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps. If the president of a company has a clean desk then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work.
• You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.
• In business, words are words; explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.
• Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.
• It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.
• A true leader has to have a genuine open-door policy so that his people are not afraid to approach him for any reason.
• Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
• Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves.
• He suffered from paralysis by analysis.
• I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.
• I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises - but only performance is reality.
• If your desk isn't cluttered, you probably aren't doing your job.
• In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
• It is much more difficult to measure nonperformance than performance.
• It's better to take over and build upon an existing business than to start a new one.
• Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.