Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to get people excited about the subject of business process improvement. The phrase itself has no personality, no flair.

Of course, we know that continuous improvement and innovation are requirements for success in today’s hyper-competitive environment. One way to get teams excited about business process improvement is to bring meaning to it using an inspiring motto or catchphrase that gives life to the idea. You can choose one and use it as the theme for your business process improvement efforts, or offer a new bit of inspiration every week.

Of course, you can invent your own, but we’ve found some quotes from business leaders and others that might do quite nicely. Here are a few. 

• “It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.”  - W. Edwards Deming

• “In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” - Author Unknown

• “Fall seven times. Stand up eight.”  - Old Japanese Proverb

• “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw

• “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.”  - C. S. Lewis

• “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” - Epictetus

• “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” – Henry Ford

• “A reputation for one thousand years may depend upon the conduct of a single moment.” - Ernest Bramah

• “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.  - R. D. Laing

• “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” - Vince Lombardi

• "The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” - Shigeo Shingo
• "Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

• “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” – Mark Twain
• "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates
• "Quality is not an act, it is a habit." - Aristotle 

• “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” -  Bruce Lee

• “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than trying to solve them.” – Henry Ford

• “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” - Arthur C. Clarke

• “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein

• “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”  - William A. Foster

• “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.”  - Harold Wilson

• “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”  - Georg C. Lichtenberg
• “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. “ - Martin Luther King, Jr.

What's your business process improvement mantra? Leave a comment and share it!