Quotes on Management

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.

When you are on the management side, you still have to understand the artistic sensibility so that there is a dialogue with the creative side.

Learning to be an effective leader is no different than learning to be an effective person. And that's the hard part

Anger and folly walk cheeck by jowl.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory, and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact, it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work and what human beings are really like.

Economy is the method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimse the splendor of eternity, which is forever still.

Outperforming the market with low volatility on a consistent basis is an impossibility. I outperformed the market for 30-odd years, but not with low volatility.

In management, the first concern of the company is the happiness of people who are connected with it. If the people do not feel happy and cannot be made happy, that company does not deserve to exist.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.

If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management - a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.