Professional is not a label you give yourself - it's a description you hope others will apply to you.
David MaisterRead
A true professional feels no pressure to run up a client's bill, knowing that any reduction in revenues caused by being efficient will be more than recompensed by the reputation earned for being honest and trustworthy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A true professional prioritizes honesty and efficiency over maximizing profits, valuing their reputation.
This quote emphasizes the importance of integrity in professional practice. It suggests that true professionals operate with a sense of ethics and accountability, understanding that their reputation as honest and trustworthy provides long-term benefits that outweigh short-term gains from inefficient practices. By prioritizing the client's best interests, they build lasting relationships that ultimately lead to greater success.
Themes
ProfessionalismIntegrityTrustEfficiencyReputation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a business seminar discussing ethics in the workplace.
More from David Maister
All quotes →Believe passionately in what you do, and never knowingly compromise your standards and values. Act like a true professional, aiming for true excellence, and the money will follow.
David MaisterRead
What you do with your billable time determines your current income, but what you do with your non-billable time determines your future.
David MaisterRead
Similar quotes
Public health is a powerful tool to level that playing field, to bend the arc of our country away from distrust and disparities and back towards equity and justice.
Leana S. WenRead
Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him.
Omar N. BradleyRead
Men go forth to wonder at the height of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the ocean, the course of the stars-and forget to wonder at themselves. Beware of despairing about yourself: you are commanded to put your trust in God, and not in yourself.
Saint AugustineRead
If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly, but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.
Orson Scott CardRead
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.
Alfie KohnRead
I understood . . . that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.
Mahatma GandhiRead