 | Management Quotes |  |
ABC/M can’t tell you in which direction to point your company, but it can show you where waste exists and where more resources are required. Those facts are the basis for developing strategic plans.
— Tad Leahy
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Finance and Strategy
Empowerment can be abandonment when employees are given responsibility without guidance or training. A vice president who suddenly shows up one day and tells his plant manager that he will have sign-off authority for $1 million instead of the $5,000 he formerly had isn’t empowering his employee, he’s setting him up to fail.
— Jeanie Duck
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources and Organizational Behavior
While benchmarking works well for bringing inside the best practices of others, it often amounts to strategy by mimicry. It’s not very good for devising an original “best practice” that doesn’t already exist. Cross-functional teams are good at pooling existing knowledge, breaking down barriers, and finding new ways to work inside the existing game. But these same teams often shy away from more speculative data gathering, “blue sky” brainstorming and going “outside the box” to change the rules of the game itself.
— Jonathan L. Isaacs
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Best Practices and Innovation
All progress requires change. But not all change is progress.
— John Wooden
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Change Management and Progress
Twenty years ago, a fortysomething man didn’t feel the immense pressure to be a great dad that he feels today. If you were a C-suite executive and had kids at home, taking care of them was the job of your wife, community, school, church, and the Little League coach. And people were OK with that. Societal expectations weren’t that you were going to spend thirty hours a week parenting. A great dad back then was around weekends and a couple of nights a week for dinner.
But today, men face social pressure to not let their personal lives interfere with their work lives. The unspoken truth may be that the modern workplace is more willing to forgive women for their decisions to place family over work in some instances, because the people who run the workplace continue to believe that women play a more essential role than men in their households. Until society concludes that men play an equally valuable role in child-rearing, men who make career tradeoffs to spend time with their children will be seen as somehow less focused, committed, and worthy than men who don’t.
— Marian Salzman
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Women in Business
Once an organization decentralizes, localized decision-making restores diversity of opinion and offers the opportunity to tap into a wide body of knowledge. But there’s a problem: How do you aggregate that knowledge? Similar to the issues created by a competitive internal culture, the transfer of power away from the center toward the frontline employees often results in local knowledge not being shared throughout the organization. While the decentralized model has been extremely effective for developing local tactics, it has performed less well in the development of overall strategy.
…So how can we best harness the power of collective intelligence for our benefit? A decision market’s lack of an agenda makes it nearly perfect for gathering information and providing an impartial answer, but it also reveals its biggest weakness. Someone still needs to ask the questions.
…Managers who understand both the power and the limitations of group decision-making need not be threatened by its effectiveness. The aggregation and processing of tacit and tactical knowledge generated at the local level must still be brought together and formed into a strategic plan; the knowledge must be given an objective. For the manager seeking to exploit collective intelligence, this is his challenge.
— Francisco Dao
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior
Many managers believe that a good corporate culture can encourage employees to share their opinions and solve the diversity requirement, but with few exceptions corporate cultures work against the sharing of dissimilar ideas. In the competing schools of thought on culture — team versus competitive — both models embody elements that undermine collective intelligence. The team concept, based on fostering familiarity and friendly cooperation between employees, often results in congeniality taking precedence over the introduction of ideas that might prove unpopular. In an environment that values teamwork as the top priority, employees hesitate to do anything that might cause tension or question the status quo. Harmony and established procedures prevail over legitimate open discussion. When this happens, action takes a back seat to talk, and meetings become less about solving problems than about finding agreement. By putting the team above all else, this type of culture undermines the diversity of thought necessary for effective group decision-making.
On the other end of the spectrum is the culture of competition. The reasoning here is to treat the entire company as a microcosm of the free-market economy…But intra-corporate competition can easily backfire: Individual units of a company are interdependent and must share internal information, while companies competing against each other in the broad market do not. When performance is measured as a competition with winners and losers, individual achievement takes precedence over company goals, and withholding knowledge becomes unavoidable…In direct contrast to the team culture, the competitive culture succeeds in creating independent and diverse thinking — but makes it impossible to aggregate that knowledge because people are unwilling to share.
— Francisco Dao
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Culture and Organizational Behavior
Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen sat in director’s chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their lack of personal interest in profit.
— Peter Drucker
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Miscellaneous
For convenience, companies organized along product lines often segment customers by what they buy. This approach, however, risks alienating customers in two ways: Customers who happen to be in more than one segment get bombarded with multiple, uncoordinated offers. And big spenders in one product category who start buying in a second category are justifiably miffed if they’re treated as strangers.
— Larry Selden, Alice Dragoon
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing
For convenience, companies organized along product lines often segment customers by what they buy. This approach, however, risks alienating customers in two ways: Customers who happen to be in more than one segment get bombarded with multiple, uncoordinated offers. And big spenders in one product category who start buying in a second category are justifiably miffed if they’re treated as strangers.
— Larry Selden, Alice Dragoon
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing