Quotes About Accountability

What's really wrong with making them the problem is that you abdicate your own responsibility. Once you say some mysterious they is in charge, then you're able to sit back comfortably and complain about how they are doing it.

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.

He was running the business for him, not for me.

The Glory was entrusted to you, you weren't given permission to pass it on as you see fit.

Loose management practices dominate agency cultures, just as they did during the high-profit past. Client heads are not held accountable for depressed fee levels, unmanaged workloads or insufficient resources for client work. Office heads are not held accountable for the varied performance of their client heads.

Accountability for agency operations is fragmented. Each office in a network is a separate profit center. Each department in an office self-defines its missions. Creative heads focus on creativity; finance directors focus on headcounts, overhead and budgeted/ actual costs and profits; client heads manage the service that they provide to their 'disorganized' clients and keep them coming back for more. (Despite this there seem to be very few happy clients.) Managing

When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, 'sorry' just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.

en política las explicaciones siempre llegan demasiado tarde. Nunca debes dar explicaciones ni quejarte. Como mucho, si eres afortunado, lograrás vengarte.

Others felt that their question had already been answered in the minds of other group members, and if they asked the question, it would be considered a dumb question, and they would be put down as being stupid or not going along with the group. Because people did not ask questions, people lost lives when the Titanic sank, when the Challenger crashed, when President Kennedy authorized a covert attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.

Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

Our players aren't our problem. But we are what our record says we are.

The root of the CDC's behavior was simple: fear. They didn't want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.

Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit—and then it closed the door behind it.

It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it:

We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "'Where are the ratings agencies in all this?' And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didn't want to say it. It was a smirk.

He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.