Management Quotes

Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed, we can’t make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning — much less set strategy for a company or for a human life. Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves. The more you understand the human condition, the more effective you are as a businessperson. Human depth makes business sense.
— Peter Koestenbaum

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The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
— Leo Burnett

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Without doubt, the most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity. The source of that abuse is mechanistic, Industrial Age, dominator concepts of organization and the management practices they spawn.
— Dee Hock

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This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, throu canst not then be false to any man.
— William Shakespeare

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No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.
— William Penn

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The wise see knowledge and action as one.
— Bhagvad-Gita

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A VBM initiative should pursue three objectives, according to Olsen. First, it should work to increase returns from existing assets. Second, it needs to help senior management make incremental investments that have rates of return above the company’s cost of capital. And third, it should free up cash and return it to investors when profitable investments are not available.

Measures that do not incorporate all three dimensions will bias decisions or behavior and will not link well with TSR [total shareholder return] performance. Commonly used measures like ROE [return on equity], earnings, RONA [return on net assets] and EVA are, in fact, biased because they don’t accurately reflect all three of those drivers of value creation.
— Eric Olsen

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The earnings game is bizarre because it consumes a huge amount of time and energy in managing earnings rather than managing the company.

The presumption is that value revolves around one number: earnings. But even if that number is accurate, it is only a very small part of the story. What’s strange is that there is strong agreement between management and the market that it’s crucial to put earnings in the proper context of all the measures that determine value, but many companies don’t believe that their internal systems are strong enough to provide accurate information.
— Robert G. Eccles

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The problem with the Balanced Scorecard is it doesn’t give you an actual score of how your company is doing. For instance, if you were playing basketball, the Balanced Scorecard could tell you the number of rebounds, turnovers, blocked shots and a lot of other statistics about the game, all of which help to some extent, but it couldn’t tell you the score. EVA provides that score.
— G. Bennett Stewart III

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The dark cloud hanging over the budget process is that people know they will be measured against the plan, so they aim low to increase their chance of success. They plan for mediocrity. The decision to tie rewards to budgets has done more damage to American industry than any decision in history.

The budget process is typically focused on current-period profit and loss drivers, with almost no regard for future growth. This generates a behavior problem. If you only track the first half of the current operations value/future growth value equation, the tendency will be to sacrifice the drivers of future value to push up current value. This is the incompleteness of the budget process. It neglects future growth value, and it’s a terrible problem.
— Gregory V. Milano

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