Quotes About Management

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

When it came to monetary compensation, we didn't hesitate to pay our leaders above market.

more leaders equals more bureaucracy. Leaders don't just lead—they create work for other people, in the form of meetings, sign-offs, projects, procedures, priorities, and so on, especially if they're good leaders. Others in the organization then spend more of their time responding to these leaders and less time leading or managing their own team members. Each leader has their own staff—adding yet more cost and complexity to the organization.

leadership boils down to three distinct tasks. First, leaders must know how to mobilize a large group of people. Second, they must pick the right direction toward which their team or organization should move. And third, they must get the entire team or organization moving in that direction to execute against that designated goal.

In truth, mobilizing people is only about 5 percent of the leader's job. The best leaders dedicate almost all their time to the latter two elements: making great decisions and executing consistently with those decisions.

Delegation and trust are of course vital—you can't do everything yourself, and you shouldn't try. That said, you don't want delegation to verge into a total abdication of authority on your part. You must verify that employees and the organization are actually executing as they are supposed to.

Raphael watched, and gradually he began to understand them. At first it was not even a theory, but rather a kind of intuition. He found that he could look at any one of them and almost smell the impending crisis. That was the key word—crisis. At first it seemed too dramatic a term to apply to situations resulting from their bumbling mismanagement of their lives or deliberate wrongheaded stupidity, but they themselves reacted as if these situations were in fact crises.

An inverse relationship exists between efficiency in asset pricing and appropriate degree of active management. Passive management strategies suit highly efficient markets, such as U.S. Treasury bonds, where market returns drive results and active management adds little or nothing. Active management strategies fit inefficient markets, such as private equity, where market returns contribute very little to ultimate results and investment selection provides the fundamental source of return.

Finance theory teaches that active management of marketable securities constitutes a negative-sum game, as the aggregate of active security-selection efforts must fall short of the passive alternative by the amount of the fees, commissions, and market impact that it costs to play the game.

Emphasizing inefficiently priced asset classes with interesting active management opportunities increases the odds of investment success. Intelligent acceptance of illiquidity and a value orientation constitute a sensible, conservative approach to portfolio management.

Sensible taxable investors reach an obvious conclusion: invest in low-turnover, passively managed index funds.

Most asset classes contain investment vehicles exhibiting some degree of agency risk, with corporate bonds representing an extreme case. Structural issues render corporate bonds hopelessly flawed as a portfolio alternative. Shareholder interests, with which company management generally identifies, diverge so dramatically from the goals of bondholders that lenders to companies must expect to end up on the wrong side of nearly every conflict.

While astute mutual-fund investors avoid loads, all holders of mutual funds pay management fees.

Within the realm of active equity management, investors inhabit a perverse world where higher fees correspond to lower returns. In the broader universe that includes active and passive management, index funds exhibit a dramatic cost advantage over their actively managed counterparts. Well-informed investors recognize that fund fees matter.

In an extraordinarily offensive maneuver, a number of mutual-fund companies continued to charge 12b-1 fees even after the management company closed funds to new investors.

The perpetual nature of colleges and universities makes endowment management one of the investment world's most fascinating endeavors. Balancing the tension between preserving long-run asset purchasing power and providing substantial current operating support provides a rich set of challenges, posing problems unique to endowed educational institutions.

Following the evidence, I concluded that individuals fare best by constructing equity-oriented, broadly diversified portfolios without the active management component. Instead of pursuing ephemeral promises of market-beating strategies, individuals benefit from adopting the ironclad reality of market-mimicking portfolios managed by not-for-profit investment organizations. The

Investment returns stem from decisions regarding three tools of portfolio management: asset allocation, market timing, and security selection.

La mayor diferencia entre los ejecutivos exitosos y los que fracasaron era la inteligencia emocional (Fernández-Aráoz, 2001).

El 30 % del tiempo de las gerencias se pierde por mal manejo de conflictos (Thomas y Schmidt, 1976).

El 50 % de la rotación involuntaria en el trabajo se debe a conflictos no resueltos (Mediation Training Institute, s.f.).

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about.

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that's extremely easy to terrify.

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.