Management Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have...

Project management has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy.... This approach does not really destroy the vertical, bureaucratic flow of work but simply requires that line organizations talk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization

The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.

W. Edwards Deming

Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society.

Robert McNamara

Management has failed miserably at creating increased value for shareholders. Indeed, despite some recent short-term gains, which actually only put us back where we were eight years ago, they have been devaluing our assets, turning a unique institution into just another entertainment company.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.

In fact, the nation's biggest investment pools are the retirement funds of the large corporations and governmental bodies, such as the California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS), which manages an astounding $170 billion. These plans receive a level of professional management that even the nations wealthiest investors can only dream of.

William J. Bernstein

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo—it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

Herbert Marcuse

It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach.

Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war, the management of finances —all require the coordination of interrelated activities. What these complex undertakings share in common is the task of constructing a statement of actions to be performed, their timing and quantity (called a program or schedule), that, if implemented, would move the system from a given initial status as much as possible towards some defined goal

Today (October, 1918) — it is to be admitted with such emotion as may come to hand — this question is one which can be entertained quite seriously, in the light of experience. In the recent past, as matters have stood up to the outbreak of the war, the ordinary rate of production in the essential industries under businesslike management has habitually and by deliberate contrivance fallen greatly short of productive capacity. This is an article of information which the experience of the war has shifted from the rubric of "Interesting if True" to that of "Common Notoriety."

Thorstein Veblen

Here's what management is about: Pick good people and set the right priorities.

We have endeavored to stress the appropriateness of each system to its own specific set of conditions. Equally, we desire to avoid the suggestion that either system is superior under all circumstances to the other. In particular, nothing in our experience justifies the assumption that mechanistic systems should be superseded by organic in conditions of stability. The beginning of administrative wisdom is the awareness that there is no one optimum type of management system.

Tom Burns (sociologist)

The essence of the best thinking in the area of time management (practice planning) can be captured in a single phrase: Organize and execute around priorities

[Corporate programming] is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Some see danger in bigness. They fear the concentration of economic power that it brings with it. That is in a degree true. It simply means, however, that industrial management must expand its horizons of responsibility. It must recognize that it can no longer confine its activities to the mere production of goods and services. It must consider the impact of its operation on the economy as a whole in relation to the social and economic welfare of the entire community. For years I have preached this philosophy. Those charged with great industrial responsibility must become industrial statesmen.

Alfred P. Sloan

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.

James Fenimore Cooper

Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don't understand how human beings learn and create... Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional inputs into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Peter Watts (author)

Once employees base their motivation on extrinsic factors they are much less likely to take chances, question established policies and practices, or explore the territory that lies beyond the company vision as defined by management.

As information systems play a more active role in the management and operations of an enterprise, the demands on these systems have also increased. Departing from their traditional role as simple repositories of data, information systems must now provide more sophisticated support to manual and automated decision making; they must not only answer queries with what is explicitly represented in their Enterprise Model, but must be able to answer queries with what is implied by the model.

Mark S. Fox | Michael Gruninger

Classical management theory would have us believe that the fastest way to get a square peg through a round hole is to use a bigger hammer.

The general formula of [ecological] management for the future might be, think globally and act locally.

Human resource management (HRM) developed initially from work in the United States of America in the 1960s and 1970s and since the mid 1980s has been an ever more visible feature of the academic literature, of consultancy services and of organisational terminology; particularly in the USA and Great Britain.