Management Quotes

I could spend days talking about management style. But every business is different - there is not a recipe or a Drucker book in which you can learn about management. Doing an MBA you will learn about strategy, finance, marketing…but you will never learn about management. You will only learn about management by doing it.
— Pierre Yves (P Y) Gerbeau

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / MBA Related and Management

It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance–especially not to the future of the business and to its success…What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers value, is decisive–it determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper. And what the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or service does for him. And what is value for the customer is, as we shall see, anything but obvious.
— Peter Drucker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Business Rules and Customer Related

I believe forced ranking systems are pretty ham-fisted; there is a whole series of perverse outcomes associated with them. They work in the sense that they force identification of performance differences. The question is: what do you do with the rankings? This is where it becomes much more contentious. I consider that imposing real consequences on people because of such rankings is pretty dysfunctional, and it reduces incentives for co-operation, increasing the competitive aspect of an organization, which may not be a good idea depending on what type of organization you are in.

Another worrying aspect pointed out to me by people involved in such systems is that forced rankings appear not to be particularly reliable over time, i.e. the people at the bottom of the ranking one year are not necessarily the people at the bottom the next. Hence the notion of getting rid of people seems particularly random. In addition, when laying off the bottom of the distribution, you are basically assuming that you can hire better people from outside – and it is not clear that this will always be the case.

In general I believe that the benefits that can be derived from a forced ranking in terms of identifying performance and sending important messages to employees could also be achieved by simply letting an employee know that he or she is at the bottom of the performance distribution in the group. For most people who care about their performance, that’s a powerful motivator and there is no need to threaten them further. If, on the other hand, they aren’t motivated, threatening them is unlikely to make much difference.
— Peter Cappelli

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources

Surveys show that workers aren’t resentful of CEOs’ exorbitant pay-in fact, Americans in general are surprisingly blasé about inequality-but that’s partly because they aspire to that pinnacle. People hunger to be managers because they know that’s the only path to the good life in corporate America . . . which is one reason why we have so many inept managers. This is yet another argument in favor of reducing the pay gap between management and non-management. If organizations can offer many of the rewards without necessarily the supervisory tasks-reducing the hunger to make an upward leap-and do a better job working with employees to match responsibilities with ability and ambition, they can go a long way toward eliminating not just incompetence but the cause of incompetence.
— Matthew Budman

1 Comment » Posted by Administrator / Competence and Human Resources

the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predictable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of inflexibility that are necessary to get the most pressingly intended job done efficiently and on time.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Miscellaneous and Organizational Behavior

Advocacy of a “permissive environment” for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact: One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Creativity and Organizational Behavior

Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity over the somnambulistic vices of corporate conformity may actually be giving advice that in the end will reduce the creative animation of business. This is because they tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation—that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive’s day-to-day problems; and underestimate the intricate complexity of business organizations….

The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people into a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves actually have. Almost anybody with the intelligence of the average businessman can produce them, given a halfway decent environment and stimulus. The scarce people are those who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Creativity and Organizational Behavior

The global competitor will seek constantly to standardize its offering everywhere. It will digress from this standardization only after exhausting all possibilities to retain it, and will push for reinstatement of standardization whenever digression and divergence have occurred. It will never assume that the customer is a king who knows his own wishes.

…The global corporation accepts for better or for worse that technology drives consumers relentlessly toward the same common goals—alleviation of life’s burdens and the expansion of discretionary time and spending power.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / International and Marketing

In the higher-status service occupations, such as in the church and the army, one customarily behaves ritualistically, not rationally. In the lower-status service occupations, one simply obeys. In neither is independent thinking presumed to be a requisite of holding a job. The most that can therefore be expected from service improvements is that, like Avis, a person will try harder. He will just exert more animal effort to do better what he is already doing.

So it was in ancient times, and so it is today. The only difference is that where ancient masters invoked the will of God or the whip of the foreman to spur performance, modern industry uses training programs and motivation sessions. We have not in all these years come very far in either our methods or our results. In short, service thinks humanistically, and that explains its failures.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior and Service

As a rule, the more a seller expands the market by teaching and helping customers to use his or her product, the more vulnerable that seller becomes to losing them. A customer who no longer needs help gains the flexibility to shop for things he or she values more—such as price.
— Theodore Levitt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing and Sales