 | Management Quotes |  |
If you can find people who are good at motivating others and getting the best out of people, they are the ones you want. There are plenty of so-called experts, but not as many great motivators of people.
— Richard Branson
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources and Motivation
When marketing abdicates strategic responsibilities it naturally becomes the simultaneous serf of sales and finance departments, pulled one way to increase sales and another to build profits. There is little more dangerous to the future of a company than marketing enmeshed completely in day-to-day challenges. Marketing needs to build creative and strategic tension into the usual tug-of-war between sales and finance departments. Where there is peace with marketing today, there is often strategic trouble brewing so the comfort of sales and finance executives with marketing and their initiatives is not a sufficient benchmark for marketing’s effectiveness.
— Ian Gordon
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing
Theory of Embedded Wrongs: If a problem has been around a long, long while, and there’s a dominant prevailing notion as to what will cure it, the answer is almost inevitably wrong.
— William Dunk
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Problems / Solutions
Managers don’t need pictures of hierarchy; they need visualizations of the wide-ranging connections that make up companies’ learning systems. Rather than charts showing who reports to whom, they need charts to show who knows what and whom, and who works most often with whom.
— Eric Bonabeau and Valdis Krebs
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Organizational Behavior
If you have only one product and sell to only one or two large customers, you don’t need much of a cost system to learn where you are making and losing money. But companies typically have hundreds of different products or product variations and hundreds or thousands of customers. In this situation, traditional cost systems will not accurately trace a company’s expense base to each product and customer, leading to a highly distorted view of the company’s economic model. Even a simple time-driven ABC model will fundamentally change the way the company manages its process improvements, its product variety, and its individual customer relationships.
— Robert Kaplan
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Accounting and Finance
An inevitable and unfortunate part of the “I want to be me” movement has been the idea that there is no distinction between your business life and your personal life. People treat colleagues as friends and family—often to disastrous effect. Sexual harassment is a prime example. If you flirt with somebody at a party, that person can’t have you arrested. But if you flirt at the office, it could cost you your job. Well, flirting at work has always been unmannerly. The distance of formality should make it obvious that office flirtation is wrong. But because people don’t care about etiquette anymore, we have to use the law to make them obey…the problem with many of today’s workplace issues is that they are too subtle and nuanced for the law, which is a very heavy-handed instrument. But if people don’t obey the rules of etiquette, we have no choice but to use the law.
— Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Law / Legal and Organizational Behavior
I sincerely hope that we’re seeing the end of retreats. This personalization of business relationships is misguided. For one thing, it’s expensive to have people climb poles or shoot at one another with paint guns. But the more depressing thing is that it’s taken us half a century to realize that when you remove everybody’s inhibitions, you create more problems than you solve. Regrettably, the whole retreat thing started with touchy-feely consultants who believed that if we all loved one another, then good behavior would follow. Whatever made anyone believe that? Think about it: People marry because they love each other, and good behavior doesn’t necessarily follow. People love their children, and good behavior doesn’t necessarily follow. Love is no guarantee, and we certainly don’t love everybody in our business environment.
— Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Organizational Behavior and Training & Development
In terms of managing human capital to drive the bottom line, most companies operate on two false assumptions. One is that people can be anything they want to be if they try hard enough. The second is that each person’s greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.
— Marcus Buckingham
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Ability and Human Resources
A flipside of risk is trust. Trust is implicit in any dialogue between a company and its shareholders or any of its stakeholders. Trust is implicit in any discussion about the future in conditions of uncertainty…Any increased understanding of risk will tend to increase trust; while a dialogue that is risk-blind will tend to decrease trust especially over time as the unexpected inevitably occurs. By focusing on the issue of trust, we can also emphasise that anything which acts to increase Trust in the shareholder and indeed stakeholder dialogue will tend to both reduce shareholders’ overall required return (and hence companies’ cost of capital) and increase stakeholders’ confidence in looking to the longer term in the face of any unexpected fluctuation. Increased openness and transparency in the stakeholder dialogue is thus a significant element in improving the management of Shareholder Value and sustainable growth.
— Rupert Evenett
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Risk and Trust
Much of the information needed to diagnose the cause of a problem invariably comes from the people associated with the problem. To get the needed information requires asking the right questions of the right people and then having the discipline to be quiet and listen closely. Determining the right questions to ask too often gets short shrift, with predictable consequences for results.
— John McCallum
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Problems / Solutions