Quotes About Management

Shareholder value became, from the 1990s onwards, a driver of management consulting success and, somewhat sadly, of advertising agency marginalization.

Poor leadership" is a major cause of job dissatisfaction and low morale. More than half of those with low morale rated the leadership at their company as "inadequate."34

Accountability for agency operations is fragmented. Each office in a network is a separate profit center. Each department in an office self-defines its missions. Creative heads focus on creativity; finance directors focus on headcounts, overhead and budgeted/ actual costs and profits; client heads manage the service that they provide to their 'disorganized' clients and keep them coming back for more. (Despite this there seem to be very few happy clients.) Managing

The auditing of time sheet hours is a time wasting process that can be eliminated if contracts focus on paying agencies for deliverables rather than for man-hours.

The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You're Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.

scale. The American institutions built to manage risk and respond to a virus had been engaged in a weird simulation of crisis response that did not involve actually trying to stop the virus. "The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn't possible

The root of the CDC's behavior was simple: fear. They didn't want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.

fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. "Program management" is not just program management. "Program management" is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.

the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don't. Which brought us to the fifth risk.

It's Groundhog Day," said Max. "The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, 'This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I've ever worked with.' This happens over and over and over.

a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.

The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes.

Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the LaGuardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and the event will become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals.

Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made

To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.

What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A's management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.

The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.

it became clear that Trump's approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, "Trump was a comorbidity.