Quotes About Management

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.

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. Keep breaking your time frames down into

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.

right—premature hiring is the death of many companies.

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Hackett found that leaders at "above average" companies are surprisingly different in this critical measure. They identify an average of just twenty-one priorities instead of 372. Editing the list isn't easy, but the payoff is huge. Time and money get tightly focused on the crucial activities that drive the firm's competitive advantage, and everyone has a clearer idea what to do and no problem deciding who's accountable.

A.T. Kearney research shows that the best performing companies had five hundred fewer managers per billion dollars in sales than poorer performing organizations.

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

It was an unexpected conclusion that rocked the Harvard research team. "Well-led teams have higher error rates than average or poorly led teams," the researchers concluded. Harvard was studying acute-care hospitals and other settings, including executive boardrooms. The results were consistent: Teams led by the best leaders made significantly more mistakes.

There are two ways to run a big company: by rules or by values,

Decisions about who goes and who stays, who leads and who follows will determine any enterprise's ability to embrace constant change, growth, and reinvention.

The most natural action of a senior official is to breed junior officials.

CEOs and senior leaders who are thinking about leaving a company have effectively already left, and the biggest favor they can do the organization is to get out of the way and allow the business to change and grow.

Sixty-three percent of executives surveyed say that their biggest challenge to effective performance management is that their managers lack the courage and ability to have difficult feedback discussions.7

Sometimes people have honest disagreements, but even so, the most useful question is not "Who's right?" but "Now that we really understand each other, what's a good way to manage this problem?

Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it's about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow.

Skills for Leading the Conversation

the larger the staff, the more important it becomes to make sure responsibility is owned by individuals and not by the group.

You can run a business any way you like, but you'll run it better if you build it around your strengths.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

True delegation implies the courage and readiness to back up a subordinate to the full; it is not to be confused with the slovenly practice of merely ignoring an unpleasant situation in the hope that someone else will handle it.

I have always found plans usless, but planning indispensible

Just because we cannot stop all the large leaks, that is no reason why we should open up all the little ones." T. Roosevelt