Management Quotes

The role of the corporation “is to provide individuals with the means to be socially responsible. Rather than trying to play the role of social worker, senior executives should concentrate on their statutory obligations. We should not expect benevolence of them, but we should demand probity: the socially responsible chief executive is the one who turns a profit without lying, cheating, robbing or defrauding anyone.”
— Michael Prowse

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You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.
— Galileo

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Branding is not about communicating a message; it’s about engaging in a relationship.
— Laurie Coots

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Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people — and allow people to place themselves — according to their strengths.
— Peter Drucker

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Globalization undermines neither the welfare state nor democracy, our survey argues; it is entirely consistent with sound environmental policies; above all, far from increasing poverty in the third world, it is the most effective force for reducing poverty known to mankind. But what about the view that globalization is a kind of cultural conquest? This too is plainly wrong. Under a market system, economic interaction is voluntary. This is the market’s greatest virtue, greater by far than its superior productivity. So there is no reason to fear that globalization itself threatens traditional non-western cultures, such as Islam, except in so far as individual freedom threatens them. McDonald’s does not march people into its outlets at the point of a gun. Nike does not require people to wear its trainers on pain of imprisonment. If people buy those things, it is because they choose to, not because globalization is forcing them to.
— The Economist

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Culture and International

Discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques such as NPV and internal rate of return (IRR) work well with traditional capital budgeting problems, such as replacement decisions or alternative production methods. Where they fall down is on strategic investments, such as evaluation of new product lines or investment in R&D.
— CFO Magazine

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In a knowledge economy, am I measured by ideas per minute? That’s silly. It makes perfect sense to measure a field worker in bushels per hour, but in the emerging network economy, the measurement problem has become profound. We are not driving our economy very intelligently on the basis of a real-world set of measures. They’re way off the mark. People are saying, look, we’re in an era of enormous uncertainty because we can’t even measure what’s going on.
— Peter Schwartz

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Measurement

When it becomes necessary to develop a new perception of things, a new internal model of reality, the problem is never to get new ideas in, the problem is to get the old ideas out. Every mind is full of old furniture. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. We hate to throw it out. The old maxim, so often applied to the physical world, “Nature abhors a vacuum” is much more applicable to the mental world. Clear any room in your mind of old perspectives and new perceptions will rush in. Yet there is nothing we fear more.
— Dee Hock

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Thought

When introducing a radically new product, it is necessary to understand how consumers currently frame their experience of the problem addressed by the new offering. That is, no matter how radical a new product is, it will always be perceived initially in terms of some frame of reference.
— Gerald Zaltman

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing and Perception

Basically my objection is that MBA programs claim to be creating managers and they are not. The MBA is really about business, which would be fine except that people leave these programs thinking they’ve been trained to do management. I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on their forehead and underneath should be written: “Warning: not prepared to manage”.

And the issue is not just that they are not trained to manage, but that they are given a totally wrong impression of what managing is; namely decision-making by analysis. The impression they get from what they’ve studied is that people skills don’t really matter.

So they come out with this distorted view. I’ve seen it over and over again where people have MBAs and go into managerial positions and don’t know what they are doing. So basically they write reports and plans and do all sorts of information processing things and pretend that it’s management. It’s killing organizations, and I think it’s getting worse over time.

I’m critical of management programs that promise boot camps. Managers live boot camps every day of their lives. What they need is to slow down and reflect.
— Henry Mintzberg

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / MBA Related and Management