Quotes About Management

Setting a posteriority is also unpleasant. Every posteriority is somebody else's top priority. It is much easier to draw up a nice list of top priorities and then to hedge by trying to do "just a little bit" of everything else as well. This makes everybody happy. The only drawback is, of course, that nothing whatever gets done.

It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.

The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive.

What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the "conductor.

The top man who concludes that his company needs to grow but who also then realizes that he does not want to change himself and his behavior has, in conscience, only one line of action open to him. He has to step aside. Even if he legally owns the company, he does not own the lives of other people. A company is not a child—and even with a human child, the time comes when the parent has to accept that the child has grown up and needs to be independent and on his own.

Managements are paid for their judgment, but they are not being paid to be infallible. In fact, they are being paid to realize and admit that they have been wrong – especially when their admission opens up an opportunity. But this is by no means common.

expected to get the right things done.

The unexpected success is an opportunity, but it makes demands. It demands to be taken seriously. It demands to be staffed with the ablest people available, rather than with whoever we can spare. It demands seriousness and support on the part of management equal to the size of the opportunity. And the opportunity is considerable.

Management by drive, like management by 'bellows and meat ax,' is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence. It is a sign that management does not know how to plan. But, above all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers – that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects them.

Or—most tricky of all—a boss whom you admire fails in the crucial duty of a boss: to support, foster, and promote capable subordinates.

Still, entrepreneurial strategy remains the decision-making area of entrepreneurship and therefore the risk-taking one. It is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgement.

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers' needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager's business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

Indeed, everyone familiar with business today has seen situations in which a manager's attempt to avoid misdirection through changing his manners has converted a fairly satisfactory relationship into a nightmare of embarrassment and misunderstanding. The manager himself becomes so self-conscious as to lose all easy relationship with his men. And the men in turn react with: "So help us, the old man has read a book; we used to know what he wanted of us, now ,we have to guess.

Modern management and modern enterprise could not exist without the knowledge base that developed societies have built. But equally, it is management, and management alone, that makes effective all this knowledge and these knowledgeable people. The emergence of management has converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true capital of any economy. Not

Autonomous managers in a federal structure cannot be content with "reports." They must think through what top management needs to understand. And they must accept the responsibility for educating their top management.

Concept of the Corporation.

Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence. And the manager who believes that social consciousness is a substitute for managing his business—or his hospital or his university—so that it produces the results for the sake of which it exists, is either a fool or a knave or both.

Effectiveness as an executive demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things.

Effective executives know where their time goes.

Now the effectiveness of the individual depends increasingly on his or her ability to be effective in an organization, to be effective as an executive.

The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.

Note that the question is not "What do I want to do?" Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

Effective executives build on strengths

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.