Management Quotes

Corporate strategy can guide acquisitions, divestitures, and market and product development efforts outside the scope of individual business units. But the importance of corporate strategy is often overrated…That’s because operational excellence at the business-unit level is fundamental to our prescription for success.
— James E. Ashton, Frank X. Cook Jr., and Paul Schmitz

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Execution and Strategy

…you don’t need to know a lot about people’s weaknesses. But you need to know about their strengths. Trying to correct someone’s weaknesses can be a demotivator. People gain confidence when you build on their strengths.
— Bruce M. Hubby

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Motivation

Success is a ruthless competitor for it flatters and nourishes our weakness and lulls us into complacency. We bask in the sunshine of accomplishment and lose the spirit of humility which helps us visualize all the factors which have contributed to our success.
— Samuel Tilden

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Failure and Success

People do not need the intricate directions, time lines, plans, and organization charts that we thought we had to give them. These are not how people accomplish good work, they are what impede contributions. But people do need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access to one another, resources, trust, and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organization, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources — all while helping everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be.
— Margaret Wheatley

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Management

People organize together to accomplish more, not less. Behind every organizing impulse is a realization that by joining with others we can accomplish something important that we could not accomplish alone. And this impulse to organize so as to accomplish more is not only true of humans, but is found in all living systems. Every living thing seeks to create a world in which it can thrive. It does this by creating systems of relationships where all members of the system benefit from their connections. This movement toward organization, called self-organization in the sciences, is everywhere, from microbes to galaxies. Patterns of relationships form into effective systems of organization. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. The world seeks organization, seeks its own effectiveness. And so do the people in our organizations.
— Margaret Wheatley

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior

Organizations of all kinds are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why is it so difficult to avoid creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible confines of overcontrol? These mechanisms seem to derive from our fear — our fear of one another, of a harsh competitive world, and of the natural processes of growth and change that confront us daily. Years of such fear have resulted in these byzantine systems. We never effectively control people with these systems, but we certainly stop a lot of good work from getting done.
— Margaret Wheatley

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Fear / Doubt and Organizational Behavior

Learning can be initiated by curiosity (”Is there a better way to do this?”); by happenstance (”I was visiting a customer’s factory, and guess what I learned!”); or by daily experience (”I tried a modification to the sales pitch, and it worked!”). It can also be initiated by crisis (”We are losing market share and money. We must become customer-focused, efficient, and fast.”). However, transformational change of the organic and continuous kind can be initiated only by a shared understanding of current reality and a shared vision of the future. The distance between the two – the discontent with the present as well as the desire for a specific future – creates the tension that pulls people through the change process.
— P Ranganath Nayak, David A. Garvin, Arun N. Maira, and Joan L. Bragar

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Change Management and Learning

The distinction between process and procedure is essential. Procedures contain only explicit knowledge. Processes embed procedures in tacit knowledge of both the expert and the social kinds. Many of the problems of reengineering can be traced to the treatment of processes as though they were procedures – i.e., as though people’s tacit knowledge didn’t matter.
— P Ranganath Nayak, David A. Garvin, Arun N. Maira, and Joan L. Bragar

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Knowledge and Process

It was the fatal conceit of socialism, in Hayek’s famous phrase, that wise government bureaucrats could guide society to a better future. Substituting red aspirations with green ones does not change the undertaking’s essential nature—or its likelihood of success.
— Jonathan Adler

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and Government

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
— John Cage

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Change Management and Innovation