Management Quotes

In the last 40 or 50 years, economics was dominant. In the next 20 or 30 years, social issues will be dominant.
— Peter Drucker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Social Responsibility and Trends / Analysis

I am not afraid of monopolies because they eventually collapse. Thucydides wrote years ago that hegemony kills itself. A power that has hegemony always becomes arrogant. Always becomes overweened. And always unites the rest of the world against it. A countervailing power always reacts. A hegemonous system is very self-destructive. It becomes defensive, arrogant, and a defender of yesterday. It destroys itself. Therefore no monopoly in history lives for very long.
— Peter Drucker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Monopoly

No more than 10 or 15 percent of innovations move up to that founder’s wishes. Another 15, 20, or 30 percent are not disastrous, but not successes either. Five years later they’ll say that this is a nice specialty. You know what that means, don’t you? It means you have to wrap it in a five-dollar bill to give it away. Sixty percent are footnotes at best. Timing is also important. An invention may not succeed, but 10 years later someone else does the same thing, but gives it a slight twist and it clicks. Sometimes strategies are more important than the innovation itself. The trouble is that you rarely get a second chance.
— Peter Drucker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Innovation and Strategy

Traditional analytical models of decision-making, while appropriate for evaluating choices for which there are ample historical data, can often kill off creative ideas that might be extremely valuable.

when creative people are performing a task, if the extrinsic reasons for engaging in the task are more important than the intrinsic reasons, they will tend to perform less creatively. Outside factors encourage people to focus purely on the accuracy and consistency of the outcome; while the task may be accomplished, creativity is blocked and interest in the activity stifled. This is not to say that creativity can be promoted by eliminating compensation for performance - the most salient extrinsic factor.
— Thomas Mannarelli

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Analysis and Creativity

What I’ve noticed about the really good companies is that the leadership narrows the business model down so that people can see it and make use of it. They can get a sense of direction. They’re all on the same page . . . What we’re seeing in the Speed Economy is the death of the consensus approach to strategy - the approach of the Unilevers of the world, the Shells, the Japanese. These companies were terrific at mobilizing people to reach a consensus and then act. But we don’t have time for that anymore. So I think the good leaders today present very clear, narrow business models.
— Peter Keen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Strategy

Learning from the past is more relevant and productive in stable markets ruled by the law of diminishing returns than it is in tumultuous markets characterized by technological discontinuities and positive-feedback loops (increasing returns).

Learning from the future is less about processing information and more about structuring it and seeing patterns in it. It’s less concerned with making plans than with producing capabilities. It is, as I said, a subtle distinction, but one worth making.
— Thomas A. Stewart / Claus Otto Scharmer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Learning

Communication is the key to leadership and I cannot stress how important it is in the leadership process. As previously mentioned, repetition is crucially important. Significant issues need to be stated repeatedly… I believe managers frequently forget to do this. They state things once and assume that the message is received and understood - but often it is not. To my mind, a good yardstick is to assume only when you have stated something so often that you are fed up with saying it that your audience, or at least some of them, will have got the message and are thinking about it. That is how organizational communication works.
— Taina Savolainen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Communication

It’s important to distinguish between creativity and art. The most common form of creativity is problem solving: You can’t get the truck through the tunnel, so you let the air out of the tires. I presume that businesspeople are very good at this kind of creativity…

By contrast, art depends on whether you can invent something from very little… Of course, skill and learning are also involved, but art goes beyond skill.
— Mark Morris

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Art and Creativity

[this push for creativity], it’s all so completely phony. Look at education: There’s this horrible homogenization going on - everybody has got to be special. So if it’s somebody’s birthday in grade school, then you have to celebrate everybody’s birthday, all year long. Everyone gets absolutely equal treatment; nobody is allowed to stick out—whether it’s because they are behaving badly or are brilliantly smart. Everyone has to be of equal value intellectually, artistically, and creatively; it makes me want to scream. There’s this irrepressible drive toward mediocrity; everything seems to be degenerating into a kind of middlebrow “world-class.”
— Mark Morris

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Creativity and Innovation

ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP

A well-led organization
Will collectively adapt,
Reflect on its performance
And pursue a conscious tact.

Study its environment-
Patterns, changes, trends,
Change its paradigm
Well before it ends.

Map competitive forces,
Shape tactics on the ground,
Stay abreast of changing needs
And fill them fast when found.

Build a flexible strategy,
Loose enough to accommodate,
Listen to the work force,
Let innovation percolate.

Base tomorrow’s success
On needed competencies,
Build collective strength,
Weed vulnerabilties.

Project tomorrow’s vision
Backed up by solid goals,
Empower all its players
With clout equal to roles.

Determine where to lever success
Not fearing to experiment,
Shape new opportunities
With intuition and judgment.

Let structure serve its strategy
And culture reinforce,
Identify performance gaps
And educate the force.

Execute its strategy
Staying alert to change.
Rebound with the feedback
And prepare to rearrange!

Find more poems like this in the author’s book.
— Charles Albano

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Poems