RAFFIAPALM

Continuous transformation—an organization’s capability to test and learn from experiments having to do with its own structure and processes, promoting the best-proven techniques company-wide while limiting or discarding the rest—is what will give that organization the ability to thrive in the modern era.

It’s my last suggestion as an addition to the toolbox of the entrepreneurial management function. Let’s formalize and systematize that approach, so that we build up a critical mass of like-minded entrepreneurs who can tackle the full heterogeneous range of challenges we’re likely to face in the twenty-first century and beyond.

— The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

If you have a strong vision, you are the catalyst for the change. You are the spark for the fire. And hopefully at this point, people are bought into the vision, because then it’s bigger than you. A good vision takes off on its own, and is bigger than your own ego, bigger than your own fear.

— Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner

Raising the salience of purpose is one of the most potent—and most overlooked—methods of moving others. While we often assume that human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest, a stack of research has shown that all of us also do things for what social scientists call “prosocial” or “self-transcending” reasons.

That means that not only should we ourselves be serving, but we should also be tapping others’ innate desire to serve. Making it personal works better when we also make it purposeful.

— To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.

— Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t by Jim Collins