Quotes About Management

The idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage also seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites. Ostrom

Ultimately, organizations run through directive approaches fail. They might perform in the very short term, but they can never sustain it. Or they drive people away; they don't like working where they are treated like idiots.

As you grow in your management responsibilities, one of the biggest areas of focus will be talent. Adopting an approach where you are always recruiting is the most powerful way to build a team of "A" players in the shortest time possible.

Koch was not one for grand plans. He just made constant adjustments. He always used the word 'stewardship' to describe his leadership style. He'd inherited something great and he didn't screw it up. p259

Accounting is your primary information system for making decisions, so if that information is bad, your decisions will be bad too.

A fourth way to take control of the downturn is to maximize the cash available to you. Cash is always a good friend to have, especially during the tough times.

As the decision-maker in your organization, you must become intimately engaged with leadership development, hiring, and firing.

one of the leader's most valuable but least valued contributions is avoiding trouble, not addressing it once it's occurred).

panjandrums

A good officer can get away with being wrong, but he can't be indecisive.

The first rule of your relationship with your boss is to understand that it's a business transaction.

The relationship you have with your immediate boss is one of the oddest you'll have in life. You generally don't choose this person, you generally don't care for this person, yet you have to honor and obey this person.As you rise, that relationship only becomes odder and more slippery.

You have to manage an incredibly tricky network of relationships, simultaneously, in private and in public, and in a way that announces your ability to lead.

Never ask one of your peers to carry bad news for you. If there's going to be a disaster in any part of the organization that you're running, whether it's a personnel issue or a financial issue, always inform the boss yourself.

Given the difficulties in timing markets and the challenges of security selection, such behavior provides a rational foundation for investment management. By avoiding extreme allocation shifts and holding diversified portfolios, investors cause asset allocation to account for the largest share of portfolio returns.

The shift in accountability from employer to employee caused a move from reasonably well-managed, low-cost investment programs to generally poorly managed, high-cost investment programs.

In its most basic form, the message of Unconventional Success requires only a few pages to describe the blueprint of a well-diversified, equity-oriented, passively managed portfolio, using not-for-profit investment managers to implement the plan.

Acknowledging that students have competing purposes is the first step to managing them.

It has been said that large staffs are the invariable sign of bad armies.

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to "kick them upstairs": promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else's problem.

In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organization itself.

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.

Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct—tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven't been either because no one has gotten around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible, or because of some structural confusion, or because of some combination of the three.