Quotes About Management

from senior management that my customer would not get scalped, then everyone could win. Salomon would make a lot of money. My customer would make a little money (which, for a customer, was grand). And I would be a hero. If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar

But as revenues subsided, costs all of a sudden mattered, too.

I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe," said Alderson. "They don't get criticized for it.

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

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," she said.

People don't understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

The public-health officer is like the garbage disposal," she said. "Whatever issue can't be filed into someone else's box or slot winds up in the health officer's.

a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped," Joe would later say. "There's no one driving the bus.

My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

Success is about smart risk management, not about wild risk taking.

John Patterson, president of National Cash Register, was a fan of Napoleon. Patterson rode horseback with his executives every day at 5 a.m. He demanded that they maintain a little red book to record daily activities, thoughts, ideas, and so on. He ruthlessly fired many an employee who failed to maintain a notebook.

one found that they complained less about overbearing control than about the absence of responsible control.

I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.

We had grown too fast at PayPal. Our operating expenses had grown too fast... Growth covers a lot of sin. We want to grow without sin.

The area I hope we can learn most from Singapore is in the productivity and efficiency of its public servants.

I'm controlling, and I want everything orderly, and I need lists. My mind goes a mile a minute. I'm difficult on every single level.

The more fears that we're exposed to, the more fears that we are handling every single day, asks us to exert more and more control over our lives.

My job as a manager is to get the best out of your players. Sometimes you get it wrong, and you won't get the response that you want, but we all face that every single day.

Companies are not lead by a single person; they're lead by a group of individuals collectively making good decisions on behalf of the company.

There's no way a director can communicate with every single person on the set and yet they need to motivate and instill an ambition to want to do their best work.

As founder of Eventbrite, I've interviewed almost every single person we've hired.