Quotes About Management

Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions

Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events.

Write an Action Plan

Gerenciar é fazer as coisas do jeito certo; liderar é fazer as coisas certas.

A family member in a family business has a position of authority and power, regardless of his title and rank, even regardless of his job. He has the inside track to the top—as a son, a brother, a brother-in-law. No matter what his rank, he is top management. If he cannot command the respect due a member of top management on his own merit and on the basis of his performance, he should not be allowed to stay on the payroll.

These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization.

The Functions of the Executive, that organizations are held together by information rather than by ownership or command.

Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug.

The worst kind of replacement planning is the search for a "crown prince." A crown prince either has a legal right to succeed; or else nomination is likely to destroy him. No matter how carefully concealed, picking a crown prince is an overt act which the whole organization very rapidly perceives. And then all the other possible contenders unite against the crown prince and work to bring him down—and they usually succeed.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

Even a conversation with only one other person is a meeting. Hence, if they are to be effective, executives must make meetings productive.

thus, as the organization grows, an increasing proportion of energy diverts to managing the internal mass rather than contributing to the outside world. Combine this with another Druckerian truth: The accomplishments of a single right person in a key seat dwarf the combined accomplishment of dividing the seat among multiple B-players.

Resist the temptation to redesign seats on the bus to specific personalities (except for the exceptionally rare genius)

No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success. In no other area are innovative opportunities less risky and their pursuit less arduous. Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.

There are a number of tasks which are top-management tasks, not because top management is the "top"—that is, because it has the legal authority or the power—but because they are tasks that can be discharged only by people who are capable of seeing the whole business and of making decisions with respect to the whole business.

The aim of strategic planning is action now.

But,' the chairman continued, 'in this kind of store, it is normal and healthy for fashion to produce seventy per cent of sales. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account for three-fifths. And that's abnormal. We've tried everything we know to make fashion grow to restore the normal ratio, but nothing works. The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.

The question to ask is not "What is top management?" The question is "What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

I've seen more institutions damaged by too much caution than by rashness, though I've seen both.

One reason why it is difficult for management to accept unexpected success is that all of us tend to believe that anything that has lasted a fair amount of time must be 'normal' and go on 'forever'. Anything that contradicts what we have come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound, unhealthy, and obviously abnormal.

The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.

The prevalence of surprise in the world of business is evidence that uncertainty is more likely to prevail than mathematical probability.

The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.