Ron Friedman > Quotes

“Studies indicate that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and provide better client service. They’re less likely to quit or call in sick. What’s more, they act as brand ambassadors outside the office, spreading positive impressions of their company and attracting star performers to their team.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As writer C. S. Lewis once observed, “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Successful entrepreneurs also excel at something else: pattern recognition. They possess an extraordinary capacity for identifying profitable opportunities by linking successes they’ve observed in the past with changes now taking place in the market.”
― Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

“Failure, per se, is not enough. The important thing is to mine the failure for insight that can improve your next attempt.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“The secret to happy workplaces isn’t spending more money. It’s about creating the conditions that allow employees to do their best work.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Any metric that seizes your attention but doesn’t contribute to your health, well-being, or career is ultimately a distraction.”
― Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

“company culture is not created through mission statements, slogans, or a set of written values. It is a product of leaders’ interactions with their team.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Micromanagement is the motivational equivalent of buying on credit. Enjoy a better product now, but pay a hefty price for it later.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Mistakes are the tuition you pay for success.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“One reason that recognition is vital to doing good work is that it feeds our need for competence. When we receive positive feedback, we experience an emotional rush. Competence is inherently motivating, which is why feeling like you’re good at your job leads you to invest even more of yourself in your work.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“What do Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Picasso, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Schubert, Brahms, and Dostoyevsky all have in common? They all produced far more than their contemporaries. Importantly, not every one of their creations was a masterpiece. Today, in fact, they are remembered for a mere fraction of their complete body of work. Creative geniuses simply do not generate masterpieces on a regular basis. Yet the quality that distinguishes them would be impossible without the quantity of attempts.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Back in the days of the industrial economy, building a successful workplace meant finding efficiencies through eliminating errors, standardizing performance, and squeezing more out of workers. How employees felt while doing their job was of secondary interest, because it had limited impact on their performance. The main thing was that the work got done. Today things are different. Our work is infinitely more complex. We rarely need employees to simply do routine, repetitive tasks—we also need them to collaborate, plan, and innovate. Building a thriving organization in the current economy demands a great deal more than efficiency. It requires an environment that harnesses intelligence, creativity, and interpersonal skill.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“We know that decorating your office can make you more productive, that going for a walk can lead to better decisions, and that embracing failure can actually help you succeed.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“His response captures what might be the ideal formula for popular appeal: “It’s derivative with a twist. That’s what they’re looking for.” In other words, if outright mimicry leads us nowhere and absolute novelty is met with scorn, the solution is to steer clear of both extremes. What gets noticed is the generally familiar with a minor variation. Karim Lakhani, one of the Harvard Business School professors who conducted the grant study, has another term for this: optimal newness.”
― Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

“Unlike in the workplace, there’s also less pressure in a quiet home environment to multitask. While we like to believe that we’re good at multitasking, research suggests it’s rarely an effective strategy. What appears to us as tackling several activities at once often involves simply shuffling between tasks, for which there are serious consequences. When we multitask, our performance suffers, and our stress levels spike. In part, it’s because redirecting our attention from one task to another depletes our cognitive resources, leaving us with less mental energy than if we had simply devoted our full attention to one activity at a time. Researchers are also finding that chronic multitaskers—those of us who can’t help but read e-mails while talking on the phone, for example—are especially prone to experiencing boredom, anxiety, and depression.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“British philosopher Alain de Botton relishes this perspective and argues that it explains a great deal. For one thing, de Botton suggests, it clarifies why some cultures are drawn to lavish, opulent decors (he cites the Russians and Saudis as examples) while others prefer clean, simple design (such as those popular in Scandinavian countries). Both are a reaction to historical conditions. The Russians and Saudis endured decades of economic deprivation, and since extravagant interiors represent the opposite of poverty, they favor ostentatious decor. (A similar case has been made for the enthusiastic display of gold chains, rings, and teeth that are fashionable among newly successful rappers.) Scandinavians, on the other hand, were raised in relative financial security and do not share a desire for visual reminders of wealth. Instead, they favor calm, peaceful interiors as an antidote to the overstimulation of everyday life.”
― Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

“A University of California–Irvine study found that when we’re distracted from an activity in which we are fully immersed, it takes us an average of more than twenty minutes just to regain our previous momentum.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As far as missteps go, it’s not an inconsequential amount. “Our policy is we try things,” said then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when announcing in 2010 that the company was pulling the plug on Google Wave. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.” Cofounder Larry Page echoed the sentiment. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing that people don’t get.” And in a way, that’s what makes them so prolific. It’s the successful innovators’ dirty little secret: They fail more than the rest of us. SPANX”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“What’s odd is that in many ways it’s the precise opposite”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Which leads to an interesting conclusion: When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity. And, as we’ll see in this next section, sometimes it can mean the difference between life and death. WHY”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Accepting failure doesn’t just make risk-taking easier. In a surprising number of instances, it’s the only reliable path to success.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Software development company HCL Technologies takes it one step further by inviting executives to create a Failure CV. To enter the firm’s highly coveted internal leadership program, applicants are required to list some of their biggest career blunders and then explain what they’ve learned from each experience.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“If you’re surrounded by people who are passionate and inspired, that’s likely to influence your experience.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Your actions echo well beyond the people you know and affect networks of people you may never even meet.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As British essayist Samuel Johnson once put it, “He who praises everybody praises nobody.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“The moment evading a negative outcome becomes the focus, our attention narrows and our thinking becomes more rigid. We have a hard time seeing the big picture and resist the mental exploration necessary for finding a solution. All of a sudden, insights become a lot more elusive.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“As Daniel Coyle points out in The Little Book of Talent, successful athletes don’t just fail during games. They go out of their way to seek out failure during practice. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky, for example, would often fall flat on the ice during skating exercises. It’s not that he’d forgotten how to skate. He was deliberately pushing his boundaries, experimenting with the limits of his ability. When practice is effortless, Coyle argues, learning stops. It’s by walking the precipice between your current abilities and the skills just beyond your reach that growth happens. Master performers don’t get to where they are by playing at the same level day after day. They do so by risking failure and using the feedback to master new skills.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“Conversely, when we view getting ahead as a matter of ability, we’re more likely to experience the less assured, hubristic pride.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“It means that you possess limited control over outcomes in life. Either you have what it takes, or you don’t. No wonder hubristic pride leads to bombastic displays of self-promotion—it’s as if by convincing others of our virtues we hope to simultaneously diminish our own insecurity.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

“When your attempt rate is high, each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.”
― Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace