Karl Albrecht Quotations

If you're not serving the customer, you'd better be serving someone who is.

Change your language and you change your thoughts.

The typical human life seems to be quite unplanned, undirected, unlived, and unsavored. Only those who consciously think about the adventure of living as a matter of making choices among options, which they have found for themselves, ever establish real self-control and live their lives fully.

If the frontline people do count, you couldn't prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.

We are going to need organizations that are culturally equipped to adapt. They must have internal processes that are creative, generative, and productive rather than controlled, confining, and normative. In short, we must UNSHACKLE THE HUMAN BRAIN and exploit its productive potential.

Albrecht's Law - Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity.

Customer needs have an unsettling way of not staying satisfied for very long.

The Zen philosophy posits that 'human beings suffer' and 'the cause of suffering is desire.' The way to put an end to suffering is to stop wanting everything, all the time.

Old paradigms die hard, even if they don't work.

Televisions and movies have made many Americans into habitual consumers of synthetic experience-audiovisual fantasies that simply pass the time.

In an organization of any significant size, the executives cannot create the future single-handedly. They must develop the enterprise in a constellation of teams within the overall team if they hope to bring the special talents and resources to bear on the challenge of creating superior customer value and sustaining a competitive advantage in the eyes of its customers.

You seldom improve quality by cutting costs, but you can often cut costs by improving quality.

Start out with an ideal and end up with a deal.

There are only two ways to establish competitive advantage: do things better than others or do them differently.