Quotes About Management

Articulate each meeting's purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan's legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM's industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century.

For an example of empathy in action, consider what happened when two giant brokerage companies merged, creating redundant jobs in all their divisions. One division manager called his people together and gave a gloomy speech that emphasized the number of people who would soon be fired. The manager of another division gave his people a different kind of speech. He was up-front about his own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat everyone fairly.

Bosses are neither a title on the organization chart nor a "function." They are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.

Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work.

The art of management is the art of making meaningful generalizations out of inadequate facts.

In short, a customer feedback program should be viewed not as "market research" but as an operating management tool.

If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

Understanding, acceptance, and management (or not!) of your choosing really are the names of the game here: they are what's actually doable and also won't make you feel even shittier about yourself than perimenopause can make you feel already.

One has to be in control, otherwise the whole dynamic becomes a total disaster.

No director directs 'Game of Thrones' without reading all the episodes and knowing what's going on. All the episodes are written in advance, so you can do that, which is an important point.

The business was in a very difficult state when I first took over the company. I walked into a situation where cheques were getting written, popped in drawers, so that when people phoned up, they could honestly say, 'Look, we've signed the cheque. You'll get it ultimately.'

If you look on Amazon - if you do a search for personal finance, there are literally 20,000 books written on personal finance, and there's no real reason for it. I mean, personal finance is pretty simple.

There's nothing wrong with anger provided you use it constructively.

Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

The mark of a bad leader is not to make the wrong decision. It is to make no decision at all.

In management terms, directing opera certainly prepares you for a film set: the magnitude of it, the experts in other fields that you have to call on. Both are massive ensemble jobs in which there's incredible pressure to get things done on time and on budget - so much so that making the wrong decision may be better than making no decision at all.

It's not good if owners of sports teams are talking to sports journalists, bypassing the manager. That goes in the wrong direction wherever it happens. Therefore, I'll refrain from doing this at all.

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment.

Putting the budget ahead of the policy is the wrong way to do it. It's too often the way it's done in Washington.

BBC TV gets hold of an idea and beats it to death until we're all heartily sick of it. They buy people without thinking what they're going to do with them. It's the wrong way around. What they should be doing is employing really good ideas people to come up with good ideas.

In any given day, our administration has about 2 million employees, and things happen. We put in process procedures to make sure if there has been any wrongdoing, there will be appropriate consequences, and we will move on.

WWE doesn't do anything to protect the wrestlers; they do things to protect themselves.

I certainly think you could look at the business side of how WWE was run, which was as a conservative company with little debt and strong cash balance.