Paul Gibbons Quotes

#1. A vision inspires, aligns, and directs. it says to other people, "here is what I am up to, come and play in my sandbox!

Paul Gibbons

#2. Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

Paul Gibbons

#3. As life progresses, baggage can accumulate. For a while, things can be swept under the rug, but the wait of unfinished business eventually catches up.

Paul Gibbons

#4. The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

Paul Gibbons

#5. Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

Paul Gibbons

#6. A life is a terrible thing to waste. Reach your potential. Thrive.

Paul Gibbons

#7. The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

Paul Gibbons

#8. Feeling entitled is the opposite of feeling grateful. Gratitude opens the heart, entitlement closes it.

Paul Gibbons

#9. Be the author, not the reader, of your own life.

Paul Gibbons

#10. Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Paul Gibbons

#11. When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Paul Gibbons

#12. The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

Paul Gibbons

#13. The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

Paul Gibbons

#14. Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Paul Gibbons

#15. Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

Paul Gibbons

#16. Use of analytics is accelerating, and that means more data-driven
decision making and fewer hunches. Evidence-based management
complements analytics by adding validated cause-and-effect relationships
between policies and effects.

Paul Gibbons

#17. Yesterday's decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

Paul Gibbons

#18. Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Paul Gibbons

#19. Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

Paul Gibbons

#20. Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Paul Gibbons

#21. We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Paul Gibbons

#22. There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

Paul Gibbons

#23. Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

Paul Gibbons

#24. People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

Paul Gibbons

#25. Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.

Paul Gibbons

#26. When it comes to the arc of your life, leadership is a sacred responsibility.

Paul Gibbons

#27. 21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

Paul Gibbons

#28. Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

Paul Gibbons

#29. Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

Paul Gibbons

#30. Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Paul Gibbons

#31. Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.

Paul Gibbons

#32. The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

Paul Gibbons

#33. Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

Paul Gibbons

#34. Change is the part of the very definition of life. The world changes, and flourishing demands constant growth and life-long learning.

Paul Gibbons

#35. The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.

Paul Gibbons

#36. The storm through which you sail, called life, has no calm eye. There never is a "right time" for your big dreams. You never will, by magic, get an extra twenty hours a week when you can do that thing that you have always wanted to do. Start now!

Paul Gibbons

#37. Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

Paul Gibbons

#38. Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

Paul Gibbons

#39. All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.

Paul Gibbons

#40. The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their "gut" when they should be more rational.

Paul Gibbons

#41. Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.

Paul Gibbons

#42. Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Paul Gibbons

#43. The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.

Paul Gibbons

#44. Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

Paul Gibbons

#45. Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

Paul Gibbons

#46. It is time to euthanize change management.

Paul Gibbons

#47. Leadership must evolve into a "science-based craft", like surgery.

Paul Gibbons

#48. Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

Paul Gibbons

#49. The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

Paul Gibbons

#50. Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.

Paul Gibbons

#51. We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Paul Gibbons

#52. That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Paul Gibbons

#53. The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

Paul Gibbons