Management Quotes

“History is economics in action,” as Karl Marx noted. Marx, who got almost everything else wrong but most likely got this right, connected economics to everyday reality.

In their famous book The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant explain that economics in action is the contest among individuals, groups, classes, and states for food, fuel, materials, and economic power.
— Darrol J. Stanley

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It is the ability to delegate which, more than anything else, separates the good managers from the bad ones.

Delegation is the process of building up people, then letting go of a responsibility. It sounds easy, but it almost never is. Egos get in the way. People would rather be perceived as the authority than support the authority or expertise of the people who work for them.

It takes a very confident person to be a good manager, confidence in the people who work for you and enough confidence in yourself to overcome these ego problems.

It is human nature to want to see the fruits of your labor, to feel the dirt between your fingers, to perform tasks which not only produce tangible results but which are themselves tangible. Managers must seek a different kind of satisfaction. They have got to be able to build up people and give them responsibilities, to find ego gratification in training, directing, and overseeing others.

People will often delegate—or fail to delegate—for all the wrong reasons. They hold on to a task because they like doing it, or want to do it, or are afraid not to do it, and they will pass down some other task because they find it distasteful or “beneath them” or have rationalized that it is not the best use of their time.
— Mark H. McCormack

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Today the average college student or corporate worker considers themselves a “multitasker”. …They end up with a huge list of things that fracture their attention. This isn’t wrong in any way–for the most part it’s admirable–but there is an old saying: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a chronic multitasker, everything is a task. Soon, the things in life that are really important to them are in the same list as everything else, and the only tasks that get done are the ones that have become urgent, but often aren’t very important.

Because of this they are driven by an addiction to the urgent and continually respond to the the four P’s—those things that are Pressing, Proximate, Pleasant and Popular—leaving very little time to do those things that are truly important.
— Stephen R. Covey

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Attention and Organizational Behavior and Personality / Behavior

Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.
— Dr. Ralph Gerard

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How should we think about risk vs. uncertainty? A logical starting place is Frank Knight’s distinction: risk has an unknown outcome, but we know what the underlying outcome distribution looks like. Uncertainty also implies an unknown outcome, but we don’t know what the underlying distribution looks like. So games of chance like roulette or blackjack are risky, while the outcome of a war is uncertain. Knight said that objective probability is the basis for risk, while subjective probability underlies uncertainty.

To see another distinction between risk and uncertainty, we consult the dictionary: risk is “the possibility of suffering harm or loss.” Uncertainty is “the condition of being uncertain,” and uncertain is “not known or established.” So risk always includes the notion of loss, while something can be uncertain but might not include the chance of loss.
— Michael Mauboussin

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Organizations are out there every day, making tons of decisions, but they aren’t keeping track of them. There are many factors within organizations that make them reluctant to learn from experience, so it’s a forlorn hope, but the goal would be to have dispassionate evaluations of past decisions, and to spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it. There is very little motivation within organizations to do this, because it threatens people. Executives don’t like to be second guessed, and procedures that are threatening to them are not likely to be adopted. But as a result, organizations are learning much less than they could from their experiences.
— Daniel Kahneman

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In many cases, what looks like risk-taking doesn’t take courage at all; it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is a willingness to take the risk once you know the odds; optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. There’s a big difference.
— Daniel Kahneman

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Optimism and Personality / Behavior and Risk

A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic. Any complex undertaking is subject to myriad problems – from technology failures to shifts in exchange rates to bad weather – and it is beyond the reach of the human imagination to foresee all of them at the outset. Although the probability of any one of these events could be low, the aggregate probability of something going awry can be high. As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.
— Daniel Kahneman

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Personality / Behavior and Planning and Risk

Reputation…lubricates reciprocity, and reciprocity, say evolutionary psychologists, is how humans manage to mesh self-interest and the public good, identity and community.
— Howard Rheingold

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

In the face of externalities of any kind, markets do not produce the most desirable outcomes. This is true in the case of the public good, which is why we have such a lively debate about the proper role of government in capitalist societies. It is also true of environmental externalities. The limitations of markets are clear, and although almost all economists are in favor of capitalism and growth, they certainly believe markets need to be regulated. Economists understand that completely free markets are an intellectual abstraction (like perfect competition); it is anticapitalists who think of free markets as the dangerous reality.
— Diane Coyle

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