Management Quotes

Women have three basic things that help them cope with stress. First is collaboration–working as a team. Second, harmony–working together in cooperation. Third, communication–sharing so that everyone knows what’s going on inside everyone else. These processes actually cause women’s bodies to produce a hormone, which is their best way to deal with stress. The best stress-protection mechanism for men is testosterone. It makes them feel they can accomplish things. When men are confident they can solve a problem, their stress levels go down. We’re firemen who want to put out the fire as fast as we can. We go immediately to a solution.
— John Gray

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Personality / Behavior and Women in Business

Information should not be plentiful or easy to share. Information sharing that makes data readily available is more of a curse than a cure. A manager’s biggest decision will be rationing scarce attention. New information technologies that help filter and redirect e-mail and telephone calls can certainly help, but ultimately management decision-making is all about setting priorities. Good managers tend to want to identify and track the “essential few” things that help them make good strategic decisions. Ultimately, it comes down to the single thought, “What activities am I personally responsible for managing?” Bad managers are often simply overcome with information. The explosion of information and accessibility of it preys on the human weaknesses of many managers, which is a belief in total accessibility and a yearning for total awareness and absolute control. Attitudes like this ensure that technology cannot be a salvation.
— D. Keith Denton

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Information

Unfortunately, in many companies, the CFO is handling financial risk, the CEO is handling strategic risk, and the COO is handling operational risk, but no one is looking at all those risks as one.
— Jim Loucks

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Risk

The more decentralized your pricing process – that is, the more pricing authority you push out to the field, be it to regional managers, district managers or salespeople — the higher level of pricing skill you need to build in those people. You also need a higher level of monitoring of their performance. And you need a higher level of incentives tied to pricing in their compensation plans. A lot of companies push pricing authority out to the field, but they’ll fail to create those three conditions for success.
— Michael V. Marn

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing

What passes for a conversation in most organizations is not a conversation about facts, but a conversation about competing interpretations of the facts masquerading as a conversation about facts. So, here it is the job of a leader to encourage people to make the distinction between their observations and their interpretations of their observations.
— Charles F. Kiefer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership and Organizational Behavior

The data that we observe, whether personally or organizationally, is selected, filtered, and interpreted through our assumptions and beliefs. To a great degree we “see what we believe” and are unable to perceive data that lies outside our existing mental models. Our current way of thinking, whether it be personal or collective, governs our perception of reality and thus holds great influence in our ability to create what we desire.

So, what kind of conversation would it take to cause us to think more clearly and more accurately? Unfortunately, thinking about thinking is particularly difficult, rather like the eye trying to see itself. And if that weren’t enough, it’s also threatening for people to expose their thinking, whether to themselves or others, because often we discover that it is flawed. This is embarrassing enough, but it is compounded when people’s identities are wrapped up in their perceptions of how intelligent they are.
— Charles F. Kiefer

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

If leadership is not primarily a set of skills and behaviors, what is it? How about this: leadership is a conversation about truly important things between people who come to care about those things. As my colleague Eliot Daley says: Leaders give people permission to “care out loud.“ We study what great leaders said, because what they said is important and the fact that they said something is important. But what their followers said in return is equally important. And so is what those followers said to each other in response to the leader’s statements. Perhaps the most important conversation is the one that is subsequently stimulated among followers when the leader is not there at all (although the subsequent discussion may still have been framed by him or her). Said another way, the challenge and work of leadership is to engage people in conversations that they want to have about what matters to them, thus enabling them to evoke, affirm, and align their caring.
— Charles F. Kiefer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership

The prevailing view in North America is that the individual makes himself or herself a leader. I think it’s more accurate to say that leadership happens when someone takes a stand in favor of a desired future that other people also desire, either actively or latently. While the act of taking this stand is resolute, essentially individual, and often quite solitary, leadership also has a collective and adaptive quality in that it provokes people to project their hopes and aspirations into a changing reality. In other words, leadership arises when a person has the vision to see beyond present circumstances to a more desirable future, and other people are drawn into relationships with that person and his or her vision.
— Charles F. Kiefer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership

The relationship between leader and follower is intimate. To study the leader in isolation is misleading. Leaders make leaders, followers make leaders, the times make leaders. All are important.
— Charles F. Kiefer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership

Leadership arises from a commitment to achieving a result that truly matters to you. If your vision requires the help and support of others, then in all likelihood you will be seen as a leader. My working definition of leadership is simply this: Leadership is what the rest of us call it when we see someone doing something they love and we want to help. This principle can be difficult for those of us in modern organizations, because we have never been expected to care deeply about what we’re doing. In fact, historically, emotional involvement in work was
discouraged and sanctioned against. Nevertheless, I believe it to be the truest statement that I can make on the subject. We must learn how to bring our hearts to our daily work.
— Charles F. Kiefer

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership