Quotes About Accountability

Then you have to answer to your car owner, you have to answer to the sponsor, you have to answer to all these folks why you're not racing. But that's the only way it will ever stop.

If it's OK to register cars and license drivers, why is it not OK to impose similar legal responsibilities on gun owners?

It sounds to me like selling a car with faulty brakes, and then buying an insurance policy on those cars.

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

Todos devemos ter percepção das nossas responsabilidades.

Remember, you will never change what you permit, and never challenge what you allow.

And then I remembered something Leo McCarey said to me: "Always pay everything off.

The capacity for leadership is one of the greatest gifts in the universe. But it brings with it a heavy burden. Never forget that.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.

All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.

Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships.

Today is always the result of actions and decisions taken yesterday. Man, however, whatever his title or rank, cannot foresee the future. Yesterday's actions and decisions, no matter how courageous or wise they may have been, inevitably become today's problems

The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, "top management." He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don't know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I'm too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot." In

Finally, goals and objectives for each area need to be set. Everyone who takes on the primary responsibility for a key activity, whether product development or people, or money, must be asked: 'What can this enterprise expect of you? What should we hold you accountable for? What are you trying to accomplish and by what time?' But this is elementary management, of course.

Strong decision makers often put somebody they trust into the number two spot as their adviser—and in that position the person is outstanding. But in the number one spot, the same person fails. He or she knows what the decision should be but cannot accept the responsibility of actually making it.

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away "operating.

tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse. He either operates or he doesn't. Similarly, the effective decision-maker either acts or he doesn't act. He does not take half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the minimum boundary conditions.

The assertion that "somebody else will not let me do anything" should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia.

No member will make a decision with regard to a matter for which he does not have primary responsibility. Should such a matter be brought to him, he will refer it to the colleague whose primary responsibility it is. Indeed it is a wise precaution for members of the top-management team not even to have an opinion on matters that are not within their own areas of primary responsibility.

That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself.

The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.