Quotes About Management

When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can't do it or won't do it; he is either not capable or not motivated." This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.

Thus, a very important way to increase productivity is to arrange the work flow inside our black box so that it will be characterized by high output per activity, which is to say high-leverage activities.

The "delegator" and "delegatee" must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems, a

Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.

In other words, one of the manager's key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: •  What decision needs to be made? •  When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? •  Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? •  Who will ratify or veto the decision? •  Who will need to be informed of the decision?

The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged. Such meetings take place on a regularly scheduled basis. The purpose of the second kind of meeting is to solve a specific problem. Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision. They are ad hoc affairs, not scheduled long in advance, because they usually can't be.

Are you adding real value or merely passing information along? How do you add more value? By continually looking for ways to make things truly better in your department. You are a manager. The central thought of my book is that the output of a manager is the output of his organization. In principle, every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you're responsible for.

our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals (to move them along the horizontal axis shown in the illustration on this page), and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.

Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting—a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please

Much confusion exists between what is strategy and what is tactics. Although the distinction is rarely of practical significance, here's one that might be useful. As you formulate in words what you plan to do, the most abstract and general summary of those actions meaningful to you is your strategy. What you'll do to implement the strategy is your tactics. Frequently, a strategy at one managerial level is the tactical concern of the next higher level.

The long and short of it: if performance matters in your operation, performance reviews are absolutely necessary.

The biggest problem with most reviews is that we don't usually define what it is we want from our subordinates, and, as noted earlier, if we don't know what we want, we are surely not going to get it.

How are we going to do this in the most intelligent way? We start by looking at our production flow. The first thing we must do is to pin down the step in the flow that will determine the overall shape of our operation, which we'll call the limiting step.

A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions: 1.  Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2.  How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)

In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process.

But today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.

Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

My day always ends when I'm tired and ready to go home, not when I'm done. I am never done. Like a housewife's, a manager's work is never done.

What decision needs to be made? •  When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? •  Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? •  Who will ratify or veto the decision? •  Who will need to be informed of the decision?

Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, "Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization." Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.

A manager must keep many balls in the air at the same time and shift his energy and attention to activities that will most increase the output of his organization. In other words, he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.