John Hagel III Quotes

I've tended to work at fast-growing companies that improve the way business gets done.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

For us to stay competitive, we're transforming our services business to be reliable and flexible.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people to find, use and share critical business information quickly.

If you can't access it, all the resources in the universe won't do you any good.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

Efficiency does not grow indefinitely with increasing size.

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

'Make more happen' highlights how Staples is reinventing itself to provide every product businesses need to succeed.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously

Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

What I really like is changing a life, helping someone change a business, change a family. In the beginning, it was because I was willing to only be paid for a result. I wasn't a therapist; there were no such thing as coaches back then. You had to be a therapist and it had to be paid for by somebody, and I saw what therapists did and I was honestly disturbed by it, because I see people in therapy for five years and I was, like, "This is absurd."

We often wait for the resources before we make a move.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy... use the conquered foe to augment one's own strength.

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.

In the UK what we've found is that even businesses which prided themselves already on their efficient management find that a really beady-eyed scrutiny of their resource management, with an eye to environmental best-practice and long term sustainability, produce fresh efficiency and fresh savings that actually shock those in the company

When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life.

You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.