Alfred P. Sloan

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal."

"The greatest leaders are those who develop other leaders."

"A company must balance stability with innovation."

"The test of a great leader is how well he handles adversity."

"Success requires both vision and execution."

"The most important thing we can do is think about the future, because that is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives."

"Competition is the instantaneous ultimate arbiter of the correctness of a business decision."

"The organization must be designed around the market, not the market around the organization."

"Take the most able man in your organization and make him president of the smallest subsidiary. Give him a very real responsibility, and see if he grows."

"Professional management is the most important business discovery of this century."

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction."

"If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

"The strategic aim of a business is to earn a return on capital."

"A good decision is one that aligns with your strategy and values, not necessarily one that makes you popular."

"The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

"Leadership is the ability to get men to do what they don't want to do and like it."

"Decentralization does not mean loss of control; it means control through responsibility."

"The critical question is not how hard my people work, but whether they work on the right things."

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."

"Every business decision should answer the question: what is our market?"

"The future belongs to those who can see it coming and prepare for it."

"A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business."

"The organization structure should follow strategy, not precede it."

"You cannot manage what you do not measure."

"Success is not permanent; it requires constant vigilance and adaptation."

"The real problem is not whether a man has failed, but whether he has the capacity to rise again."

"Diversification for its own sake is a path to mediocrity."

"A leader who surrounds himself with 'yes men' is guaranteed to fail in the long run."

"The purpose of an organization is not to make profit, but to create value for all stakeholders."