Quotes About Management

Professionals speak truth to power. Professionals have the courage to say no to their managers. How do you say no to your boss? After all, it's your boss! Aren't you supposed to do what your boss says? No. Not if you are a professional. Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It's the only way you can really get anything done.

Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.

A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary. A good manager manages the coefficients on these attributes rather than demanding that all those coefficients are 100%. It is this kind of management that Agile strives to enable.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test." —Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation

If you can develop the high-level policy without committing to the details that surround it, you can delay and defer decisions about those details for a long time. And the longer you wait to make those decisions, the more information you have with which to make them properly.

OO imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control.

Structured programming is discipline imposed upon direct transfer of control.

The only way to make the deadline—the only way to go fast—is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.

Agile is a process wherein a project is subdivided into iterations. The output of each iteration is measured and used to continuously evaluate the schedule. Features are implemented in the order of business value so that the most valuable things are implemented first. Quality is kept as high as possible. The schedule is primarily managed by manipulating scope.

This physics constrains all projects to obey an unassailable trade-off called the Iron Cross of project management. Good, fast, cheap, done: Pick any three you like. You can't have the fourth.

The reality is that a good project manager understands that these four attributes have coefficients. A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary. A good manager manages the coefficients on these attributes rather than demanding that all those coefficients are 100%. It is this kind of management that Agile strives to enable.

As an engineer, you have a depth of knowledge about your systems and projects that no managers can possibly have. With that knowledge comes the responsibility to act.

A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

When we think of a software architect, we think of someone who has power, and who commands respect.

The goal of the architect is to create a shape for the system that recognizes policy as the most essential element of the system while making the details irrelevant to that policy. This allows decisions about those details to be delayed and deferred.

Structured programming imposes discipline on direct transfer of control.

As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

Notice how well those three align with the three big concerns of architecture: function, separation of components, and data management.

Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It's the only way you can really get anything done.

Stalin was not temperamentally well constituted for success as an organizer and administrator.

A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is 'Don't you wish you knew'

Remember, your own image and presence are materials you can control.

So after that I had a new rule. If I'm hired by the plant engineer, I only go over his head if I'm in project failure mode. If the project is going to fail, then I'll go over his head. But as long as the project is going to come out, I never go over his head. Now, that's a rule I still follow today.

Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for