An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays. I could not afford any hesitation, so I scheduled a daily meeting with Anthony, Jason, and the team

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays. I could not afford any hesitation, so I scheduled a daily meeting with Anthony, Jason, and the team — though they were now based in Plano. The purpose was to remove all roadblocks.

If you are late in doing one thing you will be late in doing everything.

The biggest risk to productivity is always the same: working on the wrong thing.

What you wish can only be accomplished by changing one person at a time.

How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time.

Organizations' problems can all be traced to someone not telling the right someone what had their attention, when it did.

Every country in the world had a bureaucracy, whose entire purpose was to delay important things from happening.

...without an organisation that can work together, sometimes over a very long period, it's difficult to see new projects to fruition.

in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.

Avoid over-coordination. We have all observed months-long delays caused by an effort to bring all activities into complete agreement with a proposed policy or procedure. While the coordinating machinery is slowly grinding away, the original purpose is often lost. The essence of the proposals is being worn down as the persons most concerned impatiently await the decision. The process has been aptly called coordinating to death.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

You might occasionally feel that some people are standing in the way and slowing your progress, but in reality the biggest person standing in your way is you. Others can stop you temporarily — you are the only one who can do it permanently.

One of the major barriers to productive thinking is the almost compulsive drive in most business organizations to be right.