Quotes About Management

She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, "On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme," meaning, essentially, "One leads by calm.

chancellor of the exchequer

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

The whole thing seemed to run better while I was away.

it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself.

Jesus provides a perfect example of why ownership is not about taking possession of what's in front of you but about taking responsibility for what has been entrusted to you. The men who multiplied the master's wealth were not the owners of that wealth, but they did take ownership of it.

Urgency is characterized as impetuousness, while risk management is defined not as taking the right risk, but as avoiding risk altogether.

Barry Johnson, an expert on leadership who is the author of Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems

Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems

The purpose of risk management is to improve the future, not to explain the past.

Management exists to keep the company on a steady course and provide reliability and predictability. Paradoxically, this can create blindspots that go beyond work processes and procedures, adversely affecting a company's core strategy.

You have to be able to compartmentalize all that. Your problem is you only have one compartment.

It was an integral part of Churchill's leadership code never to scapegoat subordinates.

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job.

The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.

delegation without follow-through is abdication.

The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.

A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.

In general, meddling stems from a supervisor exploiting too much superior work knowledge (real or imagined). The negative leverage produced comes from the fact that after being exposed to many such instances, the subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his supervisor.

Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or "flattened" the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.

When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it.

The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.

the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.