Management Quotes

Business leaders make impassioned speeches about the advantages of a free-enterprise economic system while running some of the largest socialist bureaucracies in the world. They have central planning, central ownership of capital, central allocation of resources, subjective evaluation of people, lack of internal competition, and decisions made at the top in response to internal political pressures. These are the fundamental characteristics of a socialist economy. The speeches by corporate executives are right; their practices are not.
— Jay W. Forrester

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There are two — and only two — kinds of variables in a system dynamics model: levels (or accumulations) and rates (or actions). Once you believe that there are only two kinds of concepts in a system, everything you look at has to be one or the other.

The existence of only two kinds of variables — levels and rates — is true of all systems. Levels — that is, things like number of employees, reputation of the firm, degree of trust within a group, and quality of products — state the condition to which a system has arrived at any point in time. They are gradually built up or degraded over time by streams of actions. Rates, by contrast, are controlled by the system policies that describe how decisions result from system levels.
— Jay W. Forrester

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as [Ralphp] Ellison went on to argue, American diversity and unease are more often than not the parents of American excellence.
— Martha Bayles

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Neuman surveyed the available evidence and found what advertisers and educators already knew–that most human beings are “obdurate, impenetrable, resourcefully resistant” toward any message, regardless of medium, that does not fit “the cognitive makeup of the minds receiving it.”

Wrote Neuman: “The mass citizenry, for most issues, simply will not take the time to learn more or understand more deeply, no matter how inexpensive or convenient such further learning may be.” People want from the Internet what they have always wanted from media: easy access to material of general interest and, especially, entertainment.
— Neuman / Martha Bayles

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Schwerpunkt, a German term meaning organizational focus, “represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time.
— John R. Boyd

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The greatest weakness of American business is that it knows no history.
— Peter Drucker

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The consensus among economists is that the truly momentous changes in working life since the second world war have been in four areas: the decline in manufacturing, the feminisation of work, the growth in part-time work and increasing professional-ism in the workforce…all these trends are likely to continue.”
— Stephen Overell

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Winning communicators don’t strive for perfection, they strive for connection.
— Judy Jernudd (??)

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The culture of science is changing. The ultimate tool in most fields, once the powerful equation, is now the powerful computer, and this change describes a shift from the quest for powerful abstract formulas to a more open-ended willingness to plug in the data and see what happens. It is a shift from a culture of powerful explanations to a culture of powerful descriptions.
— David Berreby

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Analysis and Science

A long time ago someone told me there would be three factors determining our stock price after we went public. One-third of the price would reflect how well we were doing, one-third how well our industry was doing, and one-third how well the stock market was doing.
— Tom Golisano

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