Quotes About Management

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. One you're burning up, one you're burning out.

If you don't clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it.

The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you'll know what it's really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

If you can't fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.

What's worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great "work ethic" because they're always around, always available, always working. That's a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who's overworked.

Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines.

When you treat people like children, you get children's work. Yet that's exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees.

if you can't let your employees work from home out of fear they'll slack off without your supervision, you're a babysitter, not a manager.

Part of the problem is the perceived need to fill a whole day with management stuff, regardless of whether it's called for or not. All those dreaded status meetings, interruptions for estimates, and planning sessions have a curious way of adding up exactly to a manager's workweek. While monitoring output is sometimes quite important, it's rarely a forty-hour-per-week position. Ten hours maybe, but few full-time managers have the courage to limit their presence to that.

If you can't fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don't expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There's always time to add stuff later – later is eternal, now is fleeting.

The menus at failing restaurants offer too many dishes. The owners think making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant. Instead it makes for crappy food (and creates inventory headaches).

Accounting is a department. Marketing isn't.

Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.

Southwest—unlike most other airlines, which fly multiple aircraft models—flies only Boeing 737s. As a result, every Southwest pilot, flight attendant, and ground-crew member can work any flight. Plus, all of Southwest's parts fit all of its planes. All that means lower costs and a business that's easier to run. They made it easy on themselves.

They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes.

el auténtico enemigo en un ambiente de trabajo a distancia de éxito es el exceso, no el déficit de trabajo.

Act like an actual business and you'll have a much better shot at succeeding.

You'll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.

The solution: Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. You're probably still going to get it wrong, but you'll be a lot less wrong than if you estimated a big project. If something takes twice as long as you expected, better to have it be a small project that's a couple weeks over rather than a long one that's a couple months over.

When you treat people like children, you get children's work. Yet that's exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees. Employees need to ask permission before they can do anything. They need to get approval for every tiny expenditure.