If you are not willing to fire people who lose money, you will eventually have nothing left to manage.
We invest in people as much as in businesses. The quality of the management team is often the single most important variable.
Find the best CEO in an industry and back them. The quality of management is the single most important factor in a company's long-term success.
OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture.
Management quality is the hardest thing to assess and the most important thing to get right. The numbers can look great and still fall apart if the wrong person is running the show.
Everyone at Fast Retailing must read Peter Drucker. If you don't understand management as a discipline, you have no right to manage anyone.
If a company needs a brilliant CEO to succeed, the business model is the problem. I want businesses that can be run by a ham sandwich.
I insist on management that owns significant stock. If the CEO isn't eating his own cooking, I don't want to eat it either.
If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it. Market Based Management is about measuring everything.
When you acquire a creative company, the worst thing you can do is impose corporate culture on it.
The corporate headquarters should be small enough that everyone knows everyone. Fifty people can run a $3 billion company.
Decentralization works. Give good managers autonomy and judge them on results.
I walk the casino floor every day. If a flower arrangement is wrong, I fix it myself.
I fire the bottom 10% every year. It sounds harsh. But the people who stay become extraordinary.
Increase the tempo. Increase the standards. Narrow the focus. That's how you turn a company around.
I don't hire one genius. I hire 50 geniuses and let them each do their thing. Diversification through different minds.
Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure they come back the next morning.
Running a great company is about 70% leadership and 30% strategy. Get the people wrong and strategy doesn't matter.
Size is only an advantage if it gives you options. When size becomes bureaucracy, it becomes a liability.
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.
Investing is a people business disguised as a numbers business. Get the people right and the numbers follow.
The best partnerships are ones where you disagree often enough to avoid mistakes but agree enough to actually get things done.
Performance management is broken because it was designed for the industrial age. Knowledge workers need continuous feedback, not annual reviews.
The best managers are not the ones who have all the answers. They are the ones who ask the best questions.
The future of work is not about tracking hours. It is about enabling growth conversations between managers and their teams.
We started Leapsome because we saw that the tools companies used for people development were either too complex or too shallow. There was nothing that actually helped managers become better.
The best remote teams are not distributed offices. They are purpose-built organizations designed around async communication and local hubs.
Cost is the only variable you can actually control. Revenue depends on the market. Cost depends on you.
Zero-based budgeting is not about cutting costs. It is about understanding every single dollar you spend and making sure it earns its place.
The store is the classroom. You learn more in one day visiting stores than in a year reading spreadsheets.
We buy companies that others think are broken. Usually the products are fine. It is the management that needs fixing.
I walk the floors of every operation. I know the cost per tonne in every mine. You cannot run a commodity business from a boardroom.
Sergio Marchionne was one of the greatest managers I have ever seen at work. He had a unique gift for making complex things simple and for getting the best out of people.
You do not need to be perfect to be a great leader. You need to know what you do not know, hire people who fill the gaps, and keep moving.
I give you the ball, I tell you the goal, and I get out of your way.
Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation. Every layer of management you add is a speed bump on the road to the customer.
You cannot manage what you don't understand. Go underground. Walk the conveyor belts. Understand what people are actually doing before you redesign it.
This is not altruistic. This is good business.
You cannot run a pharmacy from a spreadsheet. You run it with people. The numbers follow the people.
Leading by influence is often more powerful than leading by authority.
Great skill, integrity, creativity, and judgment.
When you want to change an organization of 200,000 people, it is almost like changing a government.
You need to define realistic targets. If you define the wrong medium-term targets, you create the wrong tensions in the organization and you create the wrong revenues and profits.
If the CEO welcomes us in and wants to have this open dialogue about high-level strategy and what can happen with the business and what can be done better, it's usually going to go in one direction. If instead you have a CEO that's putting up the walls, it might go a different direction.
developed a deep respect for Marc Benioff and what he has built
I've been really happy with the progress the company's made.
Every time a company grows by a factor of three or ten, everything breaks.
If today is the same as yesterday, it means stagnation, and if tomorrow is the same as today, it means regression.