Management Quotes

I have seen brilliant entrepreneurial strategies falter as an organization grows and matures. Obviously, you manage a $25 billion company differently than you do a $25 million company. But you change your practices, not your principles. You learn how to communicate with large numbers of employees by using videotapes, newsletters, weekly updates, frequent visits to the field. You share not only what’s going on in the company, but in the industry and the marketplace. You are careful that people don’t preoccupy themselves with cosmetic things like offices and titles. You delegate more and more, and make yourself available as a troubleshooter. You go to meetings not to issue orders or instructions; you go to learn the problems people are having and to see if you can help. You remember that systems are not masters — they’re servants in helping you carry out your mission. And that nothing comes ahead of your people.
— Herb Kelleher

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Organizational Behavior

A financial analyst once asked me if I was afraid of losing control of our organization. I told him I’ve never had control and I never wanted it. If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don’t need control. They know what needs to be done, and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchs and control mechanisms you need.
— Herb Kelleher

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Organizational Behavior

The central problem of the late-’90s business model was that customers got a free ride. In the balance between customers and capital, capital underwrote everything. Today, the best business plans are the ones where customers pay for their share of the cost. That’s a very simple test. The customers pay either by acquiring lots of product or by underwriting the development. If the customers don’t want your product now, why are you doing it now? I don’t care what customers are going to want in the future. Don’t tell me about the new, new thing.
— Fast Company

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

…everyone has a core drama that leads to their personality style. What makes each of us the person we are is the dominance of some inner wish. The wish to be loved, or to be understood, or noticed. The wish to be free from conflict, or to help, or to be able to hurt others. The wish to achieve or the wish to fail. When we go to work, we take this fundamental wish into a context of relationships. We project it on others, and rightly or wrongly anticipate how others will react to us, and then we react to their reactions. This basic wish, embedded in context, is what psychiatrists call the core conflictual relationship theme, and everybody’s CCRT is unique.
— Manfred Kets de Vries (summarized by David S. McIn

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior and Personality / Behavior

Never fall in love with an idea. They’re whores: If the one you’re with isn’t doing the job, there’s always, always, always another.
— Professor W. Sorbeck (Chip Kidd)

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Thought

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.
— Anonymous

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Achievement and Discipline

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist [or] … academic scribbler of a few years back.
— John Maynard Keynes

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Politics

…restricted stock forces you to ride the stock’s rise and the stock’s fall. An option is an expectancy of a future profit. It can be worth a lot, or it can be worth nothing. There are no negative wealth implications to you of owning an option; the worst that happens is that you walk off with no more than you walked in. On the other hand, stock that you’re awarded can fall in value, which represents a personal wealth diminution. I believe that to create the proper alignment with the shareholder, you have to give the executive an incentive to ride the stock up and share the glory with the shareholders, and if the stock falls, share the pain.
— Charles Elson

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Corporate Governance and Finance

The problem has not been the use of options in themselves but the ability of someone to exercise options and sell the stock in the short term…Remove the short-term incentive-that’s the real cure.
— Charles Elson

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Corporate Governance and Finance

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
— Douglas Adams

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Failure and Observations