Quotes About Managers

When disruptive change appears on the horizon, managers need to assemble the capabilities to confront the change before it has affected the mainstream business. In other words, they need an organization that is geared toward the new challenge before the old one, whose processes are tuned to the existing business model, has reached a crisis that demands fundamental change.

Managers whose organizations are confronting change must first determine that they have the resources required to succeed. They then need to ask a separate question: does the organization have the processes and values to succeed?

In a modular world, supplying a component or assembling outsourced components are both appropriate "solutions." In the interdependent world of inadequate functionality, attempting to provide one piece of the system doesn't solve anybody's problem. Knowing this, we can predict the failure or success of a growth business based on managers' choices to compete with modular architectures when the circumstances mandate interdependence, and vice versa.

Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a "pre–quality revolution" state.1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what's causing it in the first place.

Managers who don't bet the farm on their first idea, who leave room to try, fail, learn quickly, and try again, can succeed at developing the understanding of customers, markets, and technology needed to commercialize disruptive innovations.

Called discovery-based planning, it suggests that managers assume that forecasts are wrong, rather than right, and that the strategy they have chosen to pursue may likewise be wrong. Investing and managing under such assumptions drives managers to develop plans for learning what needs to be known, a much more effective way to confront disruptive technologies successfully.

But what feels like progress can prove to be poison if it leads managers to mistake the model of reality that active data offers for the real world.5 Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.

The strategies and plans that managers formulate for confronting disruptive technological change, therefore, should be plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for execution. This is an important point to understand, because managers who believe they know a market's future will plan and invest very differently from those who recognize the uncertainties of a developing market.

We hoped to push managers to create innovative proposals and break the boundaries of their conventional thinking.

plans, as of yet there has been no theory or process for true strategy creation. We believe the four-step process proposed here goes a long way to correct this situation. By being built around a picture, it addresses many of managers' discontents with existing strategic planning and yields much better results. As Aristotle pointed out, "The soul never thinks without an image.

By violating fair process in making and rolling out strategies, managers can turn their best employees into their worst, earning their distrust of and resistance to the very strategy they depend on them to execute. But if managers practice fair process, the worst employees can turn into the best and can execute even difficult strategic shifts with their willing commitment while building their trust.

Standard & Poor's Dow Jones Indices published a statistical analysis in 2016 detailing the dismal record of "active" portfolio managers: As is typically the case, about two-thirds of active large-capitalization managers underperformed the S&P 500 large-cap index during 2015. Nor

Nor were managers any better in the supposedly less efficient, small-capitalization universe. Almost three-quarters of small-cap managers underperformed the S&P Small-Cap Index. When

When S&P measured performance over a longer time period, the results got worse. Over 80 percent of large-cap managers and almost 90 percent of small-cap managers underperformed their benchmark indexes over a ten-year period through December 2015.

When the New York City pension funds began investing in index funds in the mid-1970s, the New York Times, in an article entitled "Why Indexing Frightens Money Managers," quoted Dave H. Williams, then chairman of the investment committee of Mitchell Hutchins & Company: "It's an avenue for seeking mediocrity.

Another visitor described them as "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares." They seemed to be "designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn't envision a land without snow."19 Ford managers, said the priest, "never really figured out what country they were in.

firms were hiring 'moonlighting' active Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents to train managers in 'tactical behaviour assessment' techniques. These are ways of checking on employee honesty by reading verbal and behavioural clues, such as fidgeting or use of qualifying statements like 'honestly' and 'frankly'.

Producing is a thankless task akin to hotel management. Unfortunately, there are not too many good hotel managers.

Our film society back home is so different from here. Making a movie is universal. Directing a movie is universal; it's a universal language. It's just figuring things out and understanding the codes and how the system of Hollywood compares to that of Norway. We don't even have agents. There's no studio system, no managers.

The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping. I know some that are miserly, very few that are good managers.

Throughout the universe of public and private funds, managers are measured quarterly against one index or another, defined by statistics, and corralled into this category or that category so that fund of funds, pensions, and other institutions can make comforting - if not necessarily prudent - asset allocation decisions.

Though few hiring managers would deliberately choose to offer women less money than their male counterparts, when using salary history to determine compensation, they unintentionally preserve the status quo. Too often, women will have a lower salary history, and, therefore get a lower offer.

Most hiring managers interview a lot of people. So many that they generally have to go back to their notes to remember candidates - the exception being candidates with a strong hook. Sometimes these hooks are how people dress or their personality, but the best hook is a strong story that's work-related.

Like wildebeest and zebra migration across the Serengeti, investment managers and consultants, too, have a habit of running together and, every now and then, changing direction.