Top 58 Conant Quotes
#2. Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.
James Bryant Conant
#3. The packaged food business environment is very Darwinian. You're fighting for survival every year; you evolve and grow or you die. It's really that simple.
Douglas Conant
#4. A strong man next to you in bed is a comfort, but real security is a German Shepherd bitch on guard at the door.
Susan Conant
#5. If you have people who are high-performing working for you, it's so easy to do your job. Otherwise, you can't even agree on the time of the meeting or who will bring the coffee.
Douglas Conant
#6. his deeply ingrained belief that the rich should repay their debt to society. Throughout his life, Alfred Loomis would feel that moneymaking alone was not a satisfactory existence.
Jennet Conant
#7. Learning to celebrate success is a key component of learning how to win in the market.
Douglas Conant
#8. People lead complicated lives and aren't hanging on your every word or the company mission statement. You have to become a broken record of your expectations of the organization and show people why it is relevant and how it works in specific ways.
Douglas Conant
#9. Integrity means having the courage to do what is right, and what is aligned with your values, no matter the situation.
Douglas Conant
#10. Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.
James Bryant Conant
#11. It would be counterproductive to tell people exactly what they are supposed to do and exactly how they are supposed to do it to a point where they become more concerned about your expectations than about completing their work in a quality way.
Douglas Conant
#12. Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
#13. The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.
James Bryant Conant
#14. But after a sojourn in the Adirondacks restored his health, he became persuaded of the curative powers of the mountain air and devoted himself to the study of respiratory problems. He
Jennet Conant
#15. I have a foundational belief that business results start with culture and your people.
Douglas Conant
#16. Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.
James Bryant Conant
#17. Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.
James Bryant Conant
#18. Leadership does take work. And it should. If you aspire to be a leader, you ought to treat leadership as a craft, you ought to become a student of it, and you ought to work at it. And if you're not willing to work at it, well, you get what you give.
Douglas Conant
#19. Even a brief interaction can change the way people think about themselves, their leaders, and the future. Each of those many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone's day.
Douglas Conant
#20. Ultimately as a leader, you're evaluated on how you interact with people. If you do it well, you develop a reputation as effective leader. If you don't, you develop a reputation for being a highly ineffective leader.
Douglas Conant
#22. Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
James Bryant Conant
#23. When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer competitive.
Douglas Conant
#24. You must bring great resolve to your work. It's not all a bed of roses.
Douglas Conant
#25. You have the opportunity to make a tremendous impact on the lives of the people with whom you work and live. Make the most of it.
Douglas Conant
#26. one of the first to provide poor invalids with a level of care that had previously been available only to the rich. In
Jennet Conant
#27. It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.
James Bryant Conant
#28. Often leaders have the best intentions, but people cannot read their minds. That's why it's important to declare yourself: Tell people why you choose to lead and the code you live by.
Douglas Conant
#30. You have to be a well-rounded leader. You can't fly by the seat of your pants anymore. You have to be incredibly tough-minded about standards of performance, but you also have to be incredibly tenderhearted with the people you're working with.
Douglas Conant
#31. On a personal level, I send out about 20 thank-you notes a day to staffers, on all levels. And every six weeks I have lunch with a group of a dozen or so employees, to get their perspective on the business, to address problems and to get feedback.
Douglas Conant
#32. Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.
James Bryant Conant
#33. All of us introverts aspire to be more outgoing, but it's not in our nature. When I was nearly 50, I discovered that the best thing to do was to tell everyone I worked with that I'm just shy. People are not mind readers - you need to let them know.
Douglas Conant
#34. There's no evidence that large, diversified food companies win over time.
Douglas Conant
#36. The time to build a network is always before you need one.
Douglas Conant
#37. Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free
society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.
James Bryant Conant
#38. Extroverts may get places faster, but for introverts it's all about working at the pace you need and, at the end of the day, performing at your best.
Douglas Conant
#39. There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.
James Bryant Conant
#40. If you cultivate a relationship in a genuine, thoughtful way, people will be more inclined to want to help you even though they don't have to help you.
Douglas Conant
#41. To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.
Douglas Conant
#42. I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.
James Bryant Conant
#43. A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.
James Bryant Conant
#44. You can't talk your way out of something you behaved your way into.
Douglas Conant
#45. Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.
James Bryant Conant
#46. Too many leaders are so caught up in the momentum of work that they lose sight of the opportunity to connect with people. I discovered that the more fully present I was with other people, the more fully present they were with me, and the more productive our relationship became over time.
Douglas Conant
#47. You have to talk about mistakes and then talk about what you have learned and how to move forward. You acknowledge missteps right away, you deal with them, and you move ahead.
Douglas Conant
#48. The corporate world has the resources to improve the world. It's where people live and work.
Douglas Conant
#49. I've met so many leaders who realize that telling your colleagues something that is on your mind is so much easier than keeping it in. Sometimes the things we make up in our heads are not nearly as big a deal as we think.
Douglas Conant
#50. My most memorable meal is every Thanksgiving. I love the food: the turkey and stuffing; the sweet potatoes and rice, which come from my mother's Southern heritage; the mashed potatoes, which come from my wife's Midwestern roots; the Campbell's green-bean casserole; and of course, pumpkin pie.
Douglas Conant
#51. Courage means feeling all those hard human emotions - all that uncertainty and anxiety - and getting the job done anyway.
Douglas Conant
#52. Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.
James Bryant Conant
#53. Scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.
James Bryant Conant
#54. I strongly believe that you can't win in the marketplace unless you win first in the workplace. If you don't have a winning culture inside, it's hard to compete in the very tough world outside.
Douglas Conant
#55. When providing people with the direction and expected behaviors, you need to be alert to the fact that they will hold you accountable. People want to know if you are walking the talk. They will be watching your every move and you need to be one in the same ... every minute of every day.
Douglas Conant
#57. A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.
James Bryant Conant
#58. If you're a wounded company, the other companies that have been around for a hundred years will smell it, and they will take advantage of you in a heartbeat. It takes a long time to get back in fighting form.
Douglas Conant
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