Quotes About Management

Risk management is not the same as worrying about your project.

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management. Strong managers don't care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff's accomplishments

Irony and sarcasm, pointed jabbing criticism, personal mockery, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all of these various kinds of disrespect from the culture. Replace them with a clearly felt sense that people at all levels are to be honored for the struggle they've been willing to take on.

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you're risk-averse, you won't do it. And that's a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.

Risk management is the explicit quantitative declaration of uncertainty. But in some corporate cultures, people aren't allowed to be uncertain. They're allowed to be wrong, but they can't be uncertain. They are obliged to look their bosses and clients in the face and lie rather than show uncertainty about outcomes. Uncertainty is for wimps.

Management is hard, and not because there is so much work to do (an overworked manager is almost certainly doing work he/she shouldn't be doing). Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you.

When managers are overworked, they're doing something other than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real management gets done.

a manager who is 40 percent used up making operations happen is not viewed as 60 percent reclaimable expense. Rather, he/she is viewed as someone doing leadership 60 percent of the time. If there is an incentive to change this formula, it suggests looking for ways to decrease the time spent running operations to free up more capacity for leading the transformation.

So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they've done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between.

I've called this idea an article of faith. Like religious articles of faith, it is a premise that the believer is obliged to accept without question. In fact, there may even be an element of sin associated with doubt. To a nonbeliever, the premise looks dubious at best, but the faithful must believe. Project managers are taught from their earliest years that striving toward even the most impossible schedule can do no harm.

The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan.

Instead of authority and consequence (the management staples of the factory floor), the best knowledge-work managers are known for their powers of persuasion, negotiation, markers to call in, and their large reserves of accumulated trust.

You can't blame someone for not knowing what his or her job should be if you don't ask for it right off the bat.

It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families.

Joe Prunty will take over, and he will run the team. But nobody gets out of their lane. Joe will still be offense, and Sweeney will still be defense.

In general, there will likely be an expanding market around mobility management services that could offer incremental job growth.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

I got a lot of offers after 'Rockstar' but was totally dependent on the team managing my work, who did not want me to sign any of the films I was offered, even though I wanted to.

My dad was a dentist; my mom managed his office.

Office hours are from 12 to 1 with an hour off for lunch.

It's easier to run for office than to run the office.

I don't really think of myself as a businessman at all. That's why I have the 'chief creative officer' role.

I actually went out and tried to hire the very best Cabinet officers that I could, understanding they can make help make the hard calls for the budget position that we're in.