Quotes About Management

It wasn't until five years after the first 360 hardware was introduced in 1964 that all of its software ran well. By then, IBM had spent nearly as much writing the software as designing the hardware. This astonished the company's managers and vividly highlighted "the greatest impediment to advances in computer technology," the problem of managing large software projects. At

As software pundit Fred Brooks once observed, "How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time." In

Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.

They often felt flooded by possibilities, leaving Perazzoli thinking that the project ran "right on the edge of chaos." More control wasn't the answer, however. "It seems like a little dose of management is needed," he said. "Yet you can never give a little management. You always give too much. Its a very precarious position, undermanaging. Yet you have to be there to succeed." Cutler

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?

All this was built on the firm foundation of primate bonding patterns. If the pattern broke down at the bottom, it gave a rabble. Loss of scale at the top led to dictators, who always fell in the long run. Democracy emerged and worked because it let people form groups they could actually manage and like. The

Business is in itself a power.

President is a curious term for the American head of state, because "presiding" in any meaningful sense is the one thing the president of the United States does not do.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Open and use a separate bank account for your entity's activities.

A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. "We were trying to run the company by remote control," he recalls. "We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can't requisition a $ 300 office chair without a manager's approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we'd realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual's freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

Yet "change management," like "Scottish cuisine" and "man bun," is an oxymoron.

There's no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink's Drive, the formula hasn't changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.

The engagement deficit isn't about what people do at work, but how they're managed. In Gallup's research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee's boss.

There's no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink's Drive, the formula hasn't changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow. Unfortunately, engagement levels haven't changed much either. It seems that every generation rediscovers the essential elements of human engagement and then does nothing.

The engagement deficit isn't about what people do at work, but how they're managed. In Gallup's research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee's boss.11 For example, employees who felt they could approach their boss with any type of question were more engaged than those who couldn't.

The word bureaucratie was coined in the early eighteenth century by Jean-Claude Marie Vincent, a French government minister. Translated as "the rule of desks," the label was not intended as a compliment. Vincent viewed France's vast administrative apparatus as a threat to the spirit of enterprise. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) A century later, in 1837, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill described bureaucracy as a vast tyrannical network.

The fault lies not with any particular manager, but with a management regime that empowers the few at the expense of the many, that prizes conformance over originality, that wedges human beings into narrow roles, robs them of agency, and treats them as mere resources.

We need to put human beings, not structures, processes, or methods, at the center of our organizations. Instead of a management model that seeks to maximize control for the sake of organizational efficiency, we need one that seeks to maximize contribution for the sake of impact.

Henry Ford once wondered querulously, "Why is it that whenever I ask for a pair of hands, a brain comes attached?

Every day, without realizing it, we engage in all manner of activities that diminish our willpower. Willpower is depleted when we make decisions to focus our attention, suppress our feelings and impulses, or modify our behavior in pursuit of goals. It's like taking an ice pick and gouging a hole in our gas line. Before long we have willpower leaking everywhere and none left to do our most important work. So like any other limited but vital resource, willpower must be managed.