Management Quotes

The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.
— Frank Kotsonis (?)

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Entrepreneurialism is a way of living life, not a way of managing life. The real entrepreneur has a certain spirit, an elan and an approach to issues that is just different. And that is the key. In a system that demands sameness, the entrepreneur is willing to be different. Only by being different can things be made better. That is the philosophy at the heart of being an entrepreneur.
— Robert W. MacDonald

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The traditional, hierarchically based 20th-century model is not effective at organizing the thinking-intensive work of self-directed people who need to make subjective judgments based upon their own special knowledge. Such people work in all companies, in all industries, and in the digital age it is these people who create wealth. We need a model for such work-a model that uses hierarchical decision making only for activities that need that authority, such as allocating resources, appointing people to jobs, or holding people accountable-but at the same time enables self-directed professionals to collaborate with their peers continuously. And that’s where you need to adapt the model: by creating mechanisms to enable such collaboration to be efficient and effective. Such mechanisms can help the organization to work horizontally as well as vertically.
— Lowell Bryan

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Organizational Behavior

When you read the history of management and of early pioneers like Frederick Taylor, you realize that management was designed to solve a very specific problem-how to do things with perfect replicability, at ever-increasing scale and steadily increasing efficiency.

Now there’s a new set of challenges on the horizon. How do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in? And these challenges simply can’t be met without reinventing our 100-year-old management model.
— Gary Hamel

1 Comment » Posted by Administrator / Management

The essence of a good reputation is not in trying to conjure up a good story to hide substandard performance, but in sensitizing management to the need to adjust performance so the deeds speak for themselves. It boils down to deeds versus declarations. A record of responsible deeds is the organization’s insurance policy when and if something goes wrong.
— Michael Regester

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Quick decisions based on wrong assumptions lead to quick trouble. Quick decisions based on a faulty analogy do the same. “Ready, fire, aim” is a prescription for poor marksmanship.

Richard Neustadt asks, “are you facing a problem that can be solved or a condition that must be treated?” Mistaking one or the other can be painful.

Are you using a flawed analogy? Assumptions that are not true? Are you asking “what should I do about this?” before you ask “how should I think about this?” If you are, you get only the solution to the wrongly defined problem.

These are the essentials of critical thinking. And there are a couple more:
* Being extro-spective: seeing the bigger picture beyond the immediate situation
* Looking around the corner: having a sense of what could happen later
* Having the ability to view doing nothing as one of the possible choices
— Stephen H. Baum

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Decision

Wolfe argues, in a distinction particularly powerful as we grapple with the limits to the information age, that information is what machines can pass back and forth, or construct by analysis, while meaning is what only people can make. Meaning, as he defines it, is a macrophenomenon that involves making larger sense out of smaller bits, while information reduces larger complexity into smaller, and presumably more manageable, units. Information communicates through signs; meaning, through symbols. For those who seek information, context is only noise; for those concerned with meaning, context is everything. Information and meaning, in short, work at cross-purposes. Communication is possible within the terms of information theory, but interpretation is not.

Monitoring interaction at the level of thought tracing…limits the marketer to the realm of information. But the marketer desires to operate in the realm of meaning because marketing in its fullest sense is the making of meaning. Monitoring of interaction in a world of ubiquitous connectivity does not solve the problem. It increases the amount of information available to marketing but it does not alter the capacity to infer and construct meaning.
— Alan Wolfe, John A. Deighton, Leora Kornfeld

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Information and Knowledge

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
— Mohandas Gandhi

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Learning and Wisdom

If you think about the WTO and the way we measure trade flows around the world, it assumes a very simple model, in which a product is made in Country A and it is shipped to Country B to be consumed. That is the fundamental assumption of the model. The question is where does the substantive transformation that creates the product take place…because that is where all of the value-added is.

But if you look at the model of dispersed manufacturing, the same product actually can be made in several countries before it becomes a finished product. And, if you say the substantive transformation then occurs in the final stage of finishing and basically that becomes the country of origin — that last country, so to speak, gets charged for the full trade statistics, whereas it may capture only a portion of the total value added, it may only capture say 30% of the value added.

And so the problem with traditional trade statistics is that you are using a system to describe a world that has already evolved and no longer fits the model. Therefore, you get all of these distortions.
— Victor Fung

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and International

Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we’re running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, ‘All children are artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.’
— Sir Ken Robinson

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