Quotes About Structure

If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

I feel like I run a business although I haven't one. It's planning, planning, and planning.

The house you built can cave you in if you didn't do it right.

A person who doesn't have a structured way of writing their goals will experience disorder, even in the comfort zone.

Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

An organization, a social artifact, is very different from a biological organism. Yet it stands under the law that governs the structure and size of animals and plants: The surface goes up with the square of the radius, but the mass grows with the cube. The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.

As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and "atypical" from exception to "rule" and "system," and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.

An excess of meetings indicates that jobs have not been defined clearly, have not been structured big enough, have not been made truly responsible. Also the need for meetings indicates that the decisions and relations analyses either have not been made at all or have not been applied. The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property.

Autonomous managers in a federal structure cannot be content with "reports." They must think through what top management needs to understand. And they must accept the responsibility for educating their top management.

Concept of the Corporation.

I believe we find imaginative satisfaction in stories that end with weddings because we live in a world that will end with a wedding. The Bible tells the story of history, a story that is mysteriously 'built into' the structure of our minds and practices, so that even writers who resist this story cannot help but leave traces of it—faint and distorted as they may be—on every page.

There is a heuristic "rule of thumb" in modeling dynamical systems: do not attempt to encompass in your model more than two hierarchical levels.

I had always insisted on structured practices with a clear agenda that the players would receive ahead of time.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

The Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test would trop such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the 1970s.

nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

wenn etwas zerbricht, dann ist es nicht das zerbrechen, was verhindert, dass sich alles wieder fügt. es liegt daran, dass ein stück verloren gegangen ist, und sei es auch noch so winzig - die beiden verbliebenen stücke passen einfach nicht mehr zueinander, egal was man versucht. die gesamte struktur hat sich verändert.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.

There will always be bosses, pastors and government officials over us—and this structure is actually a good thing. It is not our job to derail it or work around it.