Management Quotes

Historically, the critical interfaces for IT have existed with the functional departments. Key business processes such as finance, human resources, and marketing weren’t standard between companies and, in many cases, weren’t even standardized within an enterprise. In such an operational environment, business-process automation software was often custom-built to bridge the gap between the IT infrastructure and the rigid business-process architecture. It made sense to keep the IT function in-house so the interfaces between functional departments and their supporting systems could be tightly integrated.

This historical fact is perhaps the most compelling argument against using core competency to make outsourcing decisions. When it made sense to keep IT functions in-house, IT was no more a core competency of most companies than it is today. The reason outsourcing didn’t offer a compelling value proposition is that it violated the principles of Value-Chain Analysis: The interfaces that linked critical business processes weren’t standardized.
— Michael E. Raynor and Daniel Littmann

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / IT / Internet / E-Business and Outsourcing

It is difficult for them [CEOs and executive groups] to stretch their thinking toward the future. They’re very “grounded,” realistic people. They are drawn towards missions, which describe what an organization does now, rather than vision, which describes why an organization engages in these activities. Visions, therefore, must describe the desired long-term future of the organization—a future that typically is not quite achievable, but not so fantastic as to seem like a ridiculous pipedream.
— Mark Lipton

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Vision

A promotion is worthless if it doesn’t translate interruption into a permission given. If all you do is interrupt, then it’s a waste of time.
— Seth Godin

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Advertising and Marketing

What amount of value creation can be assigned to the efforts of management for a particular time period? That is the essence of accounting. Otherwise, it’s simply an appraisal process.
— Professor Charles W. Mulford (Georgia Institute of

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Accounting and Finance

Two dominant figures of that era (19th-century England) were William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Gladstone was a powerful public figure for more than 60 years. It was said that when you had dinner with Gladstone, you thought that you were with the most interesting, brilliant, and provocative conversationalist. And it was said that when you dined with Disraeli — an equally charismatic figure — you felt that you were the most interesting, brilliant, and provocative conversationalist. …ask yourself which are you most like — Gladstone or Disraeli? There’s a profound difference.
— Warren Bennis

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

Every sustained wave of technological progress and economic development everywhere has been fueled by greed, profiteering, special privileges, and megalomania.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Observations and Progress

While the focus on stakeholders may be a bottom-up movement, the control in corporations is still exercised top-down: The money’s at the top, the pain at the bottom. CEOs today are making well over 400 times the average worker’s salary. If there was any group in the country looking out for the mid-range executive–which there isn’t–they’d have some wicked things to say about the gap between the mid-range executive praying that they won’t dump him and the crowd at the top who think they’re the second coming of Horatio Alger because they fired 30,000 people and got their stock up 20 points. As long as corporations are top-down mechanisms driven by the bottom line of their compensation packages and their institutional investors, it’s difficult for me to see what difference it makes if there’s spirituality or religion at the bottom half of the employee roster.
— Kevin Phillips

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Corporate Governance and Organizational Behavior

…knowledge has three M’s: message, medium, and motivation. Message—you have to define the business-critical information in your organization. Medium—you need some sort of system to provide the right type of information to the right people at the right time. But most important, I think, is the motivation side. You have to motivate people both to populate a system and to use it. And that gets into the amorphous cultural area comprised of rewards, both monetary and non-monetary; communications, both pull and non-pull; measurement; and finally, but not least, leadership.
— Richard A. Kleinert

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Knowledge

Men and nations may behave wisely once they’ve exhausted all other alternatives.
— Abba Eban, Israeli statesman

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

Industry leaders are smart about their use of technology. They understand that IT is an enabler, a means to a business end that is always measured in market position, operating results and earnings. If such a company happens to become a technology innovator as a by-product of these objectives, fine. Otherwise, they are willing to let competitors absorb the cost and risk of technology experimentation and to let Moore’s Law (which states that data density will double every 18 months) work its efficiencies over time.
— Gary A. Curtis, Richard M. Melnicoff and Tor Mesoy

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / IT / Internet / E-Business