Quotes About Management

cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability

It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don't have these things, you'll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won't do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.

There had, therefore, to be a reason why good managers consistently made wrong decisions when faced with disruptive technological change.

In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers. Passive

Clayton M. Christensen

Processes and values define how resources—many of which can be bought and sold, hired and fired—are combined to create value.

Clayton M. Christensen

As such, while senior managers may think they're making the resource allocation decisions, many of the really critical resource allocation decisions have actually been made long before senior management gets involved: Middle managers have made their decisions about which projects they'll back and carry to senior management—and which they will allow to languish.

When managers assign employees to tackle a critical innovation, they instinctively work to match the requirements of the job with the capabilities of the individuals whom they charge to do it.

managers may think they control the flow of resources in their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don't satisfy their customers and investors don't survive.

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.

In fact, the prospects for growth and improved profitability in upmarket value networks often appear to be so much more attractive than the prospect of staying within the current value network, that it is not unusual to see well-managed companies leaving (or becoming uncompetitive with) their original customers as they search for customers at higher price points.

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees.

But this book is not about companies with such weaknesses: It is about well-managed companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance.

The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources.

while keeping close to our customers is an important management paradigm for handling sustaining innovations, it may provide misleading data for handling disruptive ones.

Managers who confront disruptive technological change must be leaders, not followers, in commercializing disruptive technologies.

Why do well-managed companies fail? He concludes that they often fail because the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also make it extremely difficult for them to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.

Well-managed companies are excellent at developing the sustaining technologies that improve the performance of their products in the ways that matter to their customers. This is because their management practices are biased toward: Listening to customers Investing aggressively in technologies that give those customers what they say they want Seeking higher margins Targeting larger markets rather than smaller ones

The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. The opportunities and challenges in your life that allow you to become that person will, by their very nature, be emergent.

the hallmark of a great manager is the ability to identify the right person for the right job, and to train his or her employees so that they have the capabilities to succeed at the jobs they are given.

Rita G. McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan, "Discovery-Driven Planning," Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1995, 4–12.

Finally, we recommend most strongly that medical educators must begin teaching tomorrow's doctors to become much better at creating, improving, and managing processes and systems.