Management Quotes

Most investors prefer “learn-it-alls” to “know-it-alls.”
— Bob Kagle

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

Ultimately, the only purpose of the buffers and caches we rely upon today, such as diskettes and compact discs and DVDs, is to overcome real or perceived supply inefficiency. As our networks become hyperefficient we will rely upon storage less and less. In other words, if you believe in a future of ubiquitous connectivity, where we can get all the digits we want wherever we are and whenever we want them, we’ll have little or no need to store them or carry them around.
— Jim Griffin

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Operations and Trends / Analysis

The media have been mining human attention — the ultimate finite resource — for centuries. Traditionally, they have done so in two ways: charging for access and selling impressions. Charging for access is straightforward. It involves offering people something fun or valuable enough to do with their spare attention that they’ll pay for it. Selling impressions involves carving out small slices of the attention that a media property draws and subletting them to sponsors…Between these standard points on the spectrum lie many mutant models.

In almost all other cases, there is no direct link between demand created in the traditional offline media and the ful-fillment of that demand. This structural disconnect has huge ramifications. Today’s mass media are the world economy’s dominant agents of demand generation (with the likely exception of our biological drives). They make us aware of goods and services, and tell us where to get them. They reign as our arbiters of taste, fashion, and relevance. Put simply, they make us want to buy. But when offline media are involved, demand cannot be fulfilled within the context of its creation. I may fall in love with the new Beastie Boys song on my way to work. Hearing it may get me primed and ready to buy the new Beastie Boys album. But before I can do that, I must shift contexts entirely. I have to wrap things up with the radio, then find my way to a record store, or go online and track down that CD.

Two things inevitably result from this gap. First, demand leaks from the system. However excited I am about the Beastie Boys this morning, it could be weeks before I’m next in a music store. By then I may only faintly recall that I was recently dying to buy something or other. As a result, I may walk out of the store with something that will thrill me less, or perhaps with nothing at all. Second, even very influential agents of demand generation have trouble getting a cut of the commerce flows they catalyze. A respected reviewer’s nod could help bring a film millions in ticket revenue. But no slice of that pie will find its way to the reviewer, the publisher, or the producer.

Interactive and highly auditable, the Internet is the first mass medium to bridge the disconnect that has long existed between the two sides of the demand coin.
— Robert H. Reid

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Business Rules and Marketing

Young organizations (like puppies and kittens) inherit agility as a birthright. As they mature, it takes work to hold on to those youthful properties. As organizations age, routines and established strategies become embedded. This constitutes a blind spot or obstacle when an unknown situation is faced.
— Dr Richard T. Pascale

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior

Social engineering…is predicated on top-down observation, root cause analysis and solutions that cascade through the ranks. ‘Social’ is coupled with ‘engineering’ to acknowledge that most managers and change agents today (in contrast to their early twentieth-century counterparts) recognize that people need to be brought on board. The central constructs are, first, ’leader as head, organization as body’: intelligence is centralized at or near the top of the organization. Second, ‘premise of predictability’: implementation plans are scripted based on the assumption of a reasonable degree of predictability and control during the time-span of the change effort. Unintended consequences are rarely anticipated. Third, ‘assumption of cascading intention’: once a solution is chosen and the change program mapped out, it is communicated and rolled out through the ranks. This can include a veneer of participation to engender buy-in.

Stated plainly, when societies, communities and organizations encounter the need for adaptive change (that is, change that departs from the trajectory of ‘business as usual’), social engineering doesn’t work. And it never has.
— Dr Richard T. Pascale

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Organizational Behavior

The prudent reformer, according to [Adam] Smith, will respect ‘the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people,’ and when he cannot establish what is right, ‘he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong.’ His goal is not to create the ideal, but to ‘establish the best that the people can bear.’
— Thomas Sowell

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Change Management and Personality / Behavior

In his book “A Conflict of Visions,” the economist Thomas Sowell argues that much of the philosophical debate of the last 200 years has been shaped by the struggle between two competing views of the world.

The “Unconstrained View” is based on the premise that man is basically good and has a natural desire to behave in ways that maximize the benefit to society as a whole. If a man is not behaving in this manner, the reasoning continues, it must be because he has been corrupted by selfish thoughts or ignorantly clings to wrongheaded ideas. The solution, therefore, is for enlightened individuals to educate the masses as to the operating rules that they should follow to achieve the greater social good. Once the masses have “seen the light,” the logic goes, they all will be better off and realize the error of their past ways.

The contrasting “Constrained View” starts from a fundamentally different view of human nature. Its adherents believe that man is inherently self-interested and makes trade-offs within a set of perceived constraints to maximize his personal happiness (or “utility,” to an economist). Under this philosophy, if mankind in total is not acting in a manner consistent with the greater good, it is most likely a problem with incentives or constraints. For example, if natives of the rain forest in Madagascar are cutting down trees and selling them to make charcoal, it is not because they are ignorant of the benefit of a pristine environment. Rather, they are trying to fulfill their personal objectives of feeding their families, and no amount of “re-education” will change this behavior.
— Jeffrey W. Bennett / Thomas Sowell

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

Anyone who has tried to justify investments based on cost avoidance rather than cost reductions knows it is difficult to make the financial case by comparing against “what might have been.”
— Unknown

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Finance

It is worthwhile to distinguish between two possible goals in making a PowerPoint presentation—information presentation, in which the goal is to present information to the audience, and cognitive guidance, in which the goal is to guide the audience in their processing of the presented information. When your goal is information presentation, PowerPoint slides can be full of information that may be extremely hard to process by the audience. However, since your goal is simply information presentation, you are not concerned with whether or not the audience can process the presented information.

When your goal is cognitive guidance, you want to make sure that the audience members build appropriate knowledge in their memories. Your job is to communicate in a way that will have the desired impact on the audience, so you need to design your slides so they are consistent with how people learn.

In my opinion, many of the examples of misuses of PowerPoint occur when the slides are designed to present information rather than to guide cognitive processing. In short, like any communication medium—including books—PowerPoint can be misused as a device for presenting information without regard for how the audience will process the presented information.
— Richard E. Mayer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Communication and Public Speaking

The job hunt is still basically done in the same way as it was done 30 years ago, despite all of the technological changes. For “Parachute”, I created a diagram called “Our Neanderthal Job-Hunting System.” It’s a large pyramid, segmented by different job-hunting techniques. Employers start at the bottom of that pyramid. They try to fill vacancies by looking internally and hiring from within. Only after that do they go up the pyramid to other methods, such as contacts, employment agencies, unsolicited résumés, and ads. But the job hunter takes exactly the opposite direction — exactly the opposite! The job hunter starts by mailing résumés and looking through ads, and only then moves down the pyramid to the strategies that employers prefer. The job hunt hasn’t changed one whit in 30 years. It’s just as Neanderthal today as it was then.
— Richard Nelson Bolles

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Career and Human Resources