You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.

As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.

CEOs the world over are fond of pointing to their workforce and saying "Our people are our greatest asset." And yet today, only two out of ten people think their assets are being well used at work.

Obviously, you have to know what you need now and what you will soon need, then hire or promote from within to meet those needs.

Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.

Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.