Contact us at +91 44 4263 6318 | contactus@maxires.com

Management

1. The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.

Hasan Abedi (1922-95) Pakistani banker and president of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Luxembourg. Leaders (July 1984)

 

2. We are beginning to recognize that it is more important to organize the unorganized than to argue about who will get the workers when they are organized.

Morton Bahr (b.1926) U.S. labor union leader and president of the Communications Workers of America. New York Times (1986)

 

3. Ultimately, the job of the manager is to get ordinary people to create extraordinary results.

Christopher Bartlett (b.1945) Australian business writer. The individualized Corporation (co-written with Sumantra Ghoshal; 1997)

 

4. Whips and chains are no longer an alternative for corporate management.

Warren Bennis (b.1925) U.S. educator and writer. Fortune (February 1994)

 

5. Either I can’t manage this place or it’s unmanageable.

Warren Bennis (b.1925) U.S. educator and writer. Quoted in The Leadership Challenge (Barry Posner and James Kouzes; 1987)

 

6. A common mistake about the imag of a manager is that they must be loud, flamboyant, and a great drinker…This is wrong. In any company, if any look hard enough, you will find quiet modest people who manage teams with great personal success.

Gerald M. Blair (b.1959) U.S. writer. What Makes a Great Manager (2000)

 

7. The first steps to becoming a really great manager are simply common sense; but common sense is not very common.

Gerald M. Blair (b.1959) U.S. writer. What Makes a Great Manager (2000)

 

8. Managers should work for their people…and not the reverse.

Kenneth Blanchard (b.1939) U.S. management theorist and author. Leadership and the One Minute Manager (2000)

 

9. Many labor problems have spirit issues at their core, with lack of respect being perhaps the biggest.

Kenneth Blanchard (b.1939) U.S. management theorist and author. “The Gift of the Goose,” Quality Digest (December 1997)

 

10. A good manager is a man who isn’t worried about his own career but rather the careers of those who work for him.

  1. S. M. Burns (1900-71) British oil industry executive, geophysicist and president of Shell Oil Company. Quoted in Men at the Top (Osborn Elliot; 1959)

 

11. Mr. Morgan  buys his partners; I grow my own.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) U.S. industrialist and philanthropist. Referring to the banker J. Pierpoint Morgan. Quoted in Life of Andrew Carnegie (B. J. Hendrick; 1932)

 

12. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain; give honest and sincere appreciation; and arouse in the other person an eager want.

Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) U.S. consultant and author. Attrib.

 

13. Ego-management is a critical tonic for vitalizing organizational transformation.

  1. K. Chakraborty (b.1957) Indian academic. Ethics in Management: Verdantic Perspectives (1995)

 

14. In large organizations, middle managers serve the purpose of relaying information up and down-orders down, numbers up. But with the new information technologies and more efficient forms of work, their purpose dwindles.

James Champy (b.1942) U.S. business executive. Quoted in New York Times (January 7, 1996)

 

15. If multicultural management is to become a reality in the fastest possible time, then skills adequate to the management of diversity must become a central component of management education.

Stewart Clegg (b.1947) Australian writer. “Business Values and Embryonic Industry: Lessons from Australia,” Whose Business Values? Some Asian and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Sally Stewart and Gabriel Donleavy, eds.; 1995)

 

16. Two of the great myths circulating now are that Heinz’s beans are the best and that I can get more out of men than they have inside them.

Brian Clough (b.1935) British soccer player and manager. Quoted in Observer (London) (November 15, 1975)

 

17. Responsibility without control is at the core of management.

Paul Corrigan (b.1948) British author. Shakespeare on Management (1999)

 

18. The problem for managers is that they have to take responsibility for their part in the organization, but they have to do so in a context that they can never completely control.

Paul Corrigan (b.1948) British author. Shakespeare on Management (1999)

 

19. Refrain from saying the unkind or negative thing.

Stephen Covey (b.1932) U.S. writer and psychologist. Thirty Methods of Influence (1991)

 

20. Management today is reactive behavior. You put your hand on a hot stove and yank it off. A cat would know to do as much.

  1. Edwards Deming (1900-93) U.S. consultant and author. Quoted in Business Week (January 10, 1994)

 

21. The role of management is always to identify the weakest links, support them and strengthen them.

Ron Dennis (b.1949) British entrepreneur and Formula 1 motor racing team owner. Quoted in The Adventure Capitalists (Jeff Grout and Lynne Curry; 1998)

 

22. Basic assumptions about reality are the paradigms of a social science, such as management.

Peter F. Drucker (b.1909) U.S. management consultant and academic. Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)

 

23. “Professional” management today sees itself often in the role of a judge who says “yes” or “no” to ideas as they come up…A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will enevitably veto the new idea. It is always “impractical.”

Peter F. Drucker (b.1909) U.S. management consultant and academic. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (1969)

 

24. There’s a rule that says if you can’t run this business, buy another one.

Peter F. Drucker (b.1909) U.S. management consultant and academic. Interview, Time (1990)

 

25. All activities to which industrial undertakings give rise can be divided into the following six activities-technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting, managerial.

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) French business executive. General and Industrial Management (1916)

 

26. There is no merit in sowing dissension among subordinates; any beginner can do it.

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) French business executive. General and Industrial Management (1916)

 

27. To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control.

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) French business executive. General and Industrial Management (1916)

 

28. Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.

Harold S. Geneen (1910-97) U.S. telecommunications entrepreneur and C.E.O. of ITT. Managing (co-written with Alvin Moscow; 1984)

 

29. Managers must manage.

Harold S. Geneen (1910-97) U.S. telecommunications entrepreneur and C.E.O. of ITT. Managing (co-written with Alvin Moscow; 1984)

 

30. The moment you let avoiding failure become your motivator, you’re down the path of inactivity.

Roberto Goizueta (1931-97) U.S. C.E.O. of Coca-Cola. Fortune (May 1997)

 

31. When I’m in London, the focus is on corporate governance things rather than motivating people to be brilliant-which is what the day job is.

Paul Gratton (b.1960) British C.E.O. of Egg. Sunday Times (London) (May 2000)

 

32. Management is the study of how things get done.

Robert Greenleaf (1904-90) U.S. director of Management Research for AT&T and author. The Servant as Leader (1970)

 

33. Management is more fun, more creative, more personal, more political and more intuitive than any textbook.

Charles Handy (b.1932) British business executive and author. Gods of Management (1986)

 

34. Management by trust, empathy and forgiveness sounds good. It also sounds soft. It is in practice tough. Organizations based on trust have, on occasion, to be ruthless.

Charles Handy (b.1932) British business executive and author. Harvard Business Review (November-December 1992)

 

35. An attack upon the trade unionists in this country Australia and upon cost structure in this country is no excuse…for management not getting off their sometimes lazy butt.

Bob Hawke (b.1929) Australian former prime minister. Quoted in Sydney Morning Herald (July 12, 1986)

 

36. Nobody is sure anymore who really runs the company (not even the people who are credited with running it), but the company does run.

Joseph Heller (1923-99) U.S. novelist. Something Happened (1974)

 

37. Hey boys, I’ve got a shotgun at your heads. I’ve got thousands of jobs at 17 bucks an hour. I’ve got none at 20. So you better come to your senses.

Lee Iacocca (b.1924) U.S. president of Ford Motor Company, chairman and C.E.O. of Chrysler Corporation. Iacocca: An Autobiography (1984)

 

38. The real impediment to producing a higher-quality product more efficiently isn’t the workers, union or nonunion, it’s management.

Kenneth Iverson (1925-2002) U.S. industrialist, chairman and C.E.O. of Nucor Corporation. Quoted in Thriving on Chaos (Tom Peters; 1987)

 

39. No matter how lofty you are in your department, the responsibility for what your lowliest assistant is doing is yours.

Bessie Rowland James (1895-1974) U.S. journalist and author. Quoted in Adlai’s Almanac (H. Schuman, ed.; 1952)

 

40. Managers should not have to choose between financial and operational measures. We have found that senior executives can provide a clear performance target or focus attention on the critical areas of the business.

Robert Kaplan (b.1940) U.S. accounting educator. Harvard Business Review (January-February 1992)

 

41. Timing originality; forcefulness; a gift for self-promotion and perhaps above all else, the ability to encapsulate memorably what others recognize as true…are the hallmarks of the modern management guru.

Carol Kennedy (b.1952) British business executive, editor and author. Guide to the Management Gurus (1991)

 

42. You can be a captain of industry with a brilliant track record at turning companies around and…still not rank as a true guru.

Carol Kennedy (b.1952) British business executive, editor and author. Guide to the Management Gurus (1991)

 

43. Alignment is not about the management of quality. It is about the quality of management.

George Labovitz (b.1940) U.S. writer, consultant and C.E.O. of Organizational Dynamics, Inc. The Power of Alignment (co-written with Victor Rosansky; 1997)

 

44. If one is on the spot, disorders are seen as they spring up, and one can quickly remedy them; but if one is not at hand, they are heard of only when they are great and then one can no longer remedy them.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) Italian historian, statesman and political philosopher. The Prince (1513)

 

45. I am the proprietor. I am the boss…There can only be one boss and that is me.

Robert Maxwell (1923-91) British publisher, business executive and politician. July 13, 1984. Speech to labor leaders. Quoted in Maxwell: The Outsider (Tom Bower; 1988)

 

46. The process of developing heterogeneous resources must be continuous; it is never completed.

Douglas McGregor (1906-64) U.S. academic, educator and management theorist. The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)

 

47. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world.

Robert Menzies (1894-1978) Australian prime minister. 1954. First William Queale Memorial Lecture, Wit and Wisdom of Robert Menzies (1982)

 

48. The key managerial processes are enormously complex and mysterious, drawing on the vaguest of information and using the least articulated of mental processes.

Henry Mintzberg (b.1939) Canadian academic and management theorist. Harvard Business Review (July-August 1976)

 

49. Professional management is an invention that produced gain in organizational efficiency so great that it eventually destroyed organizational effectiveness.

Henry Mintzberg (b.1939) Canadian academic and management theorist. Mintzberg on Management (1989)

 

50. Society has become unmanageable as a result of management.

Henry Mintzberg (b.1939) Canadian academic and management theorist. Mintzberg on Management (1989)

 

51. Men love to organize.

James Mooney (1884-1957) U.S. business executive. Onward Industry (co-written with Alan Reiley; 1931)

 

52. Highly centralized management can suffocate the innovative energies of individuals in the subsidiary units.

Nitin Nohria (b.1962) U.S. writer. The Differentiated Network (co-written with Sumantra Ghoshal; 1997)

 

53. They anchor themselves in the stomach of the business.

James O’Shea, U.S. author, journalist and editor. Referring to the tendency of management consultancies to form dependent relationships with clients. Dangerous Company (co-written with Charles Madigan; 1997)

 

54. We have a technique at Hewlett-Packard for helping managers and supervisors know their people and understand the work their people are doing…Management by Walking About.

David Packard (1912-96) U.S. entrepreneur and cofounder of Hewlett-Packard. The HP Way (1995)

 

55. A great many American managers are influenced by beliefs, assumptions and perceptions about management that unduly constrain them.

Richard Pascale (b.1938) U.S. academic and author. The Art of Japanese Management (co-written with Anthony Athos; 1981)

 

56. A couple of hours in a hot kitchen can teach you as much about management as the latest books on reengineering or total quality management.

Tom Peters (b.1942) U.S. management consultant and author. “The Way the Cookie Crumbles” (1995)

 

57. He not only conducts his version of Beethoven and Bach, but scores it as he goes along.

Tom Peters (b.1942) U.S. management consultant and author. Referring to the management style of Cable Network News. Liberation Management (1992)

 

58. Our fixation with financial measures leads us to downplay or ignore less tangible non-financial measures.

Tom Peters (b.1942) U.S. management consultant and author. Thriving in Chaos (1987)

 

59. Managers should be getting everybody from the top of the human organization to the bottom doing things that make the business successful.

Bill Reffitt (b.1946) U.S. writer. Quoted in “Linking the People wih the Strategic Needs of Business,” Organizational Dynamics (Randall S. Schuler; 1992)

 

60. If management is people, management must become humanagement.

Jonas Ridderstrale, Swedish academic and author. Funky Business (co-written with Kjell Nordstrom; 2000)

 

61. Controlled unreasonableness.

Gerry Robinson (b.1948) Irish chairman of Granada Television and chairman of the Arts Council of England. Referring to his personnel management style. Management Today (April 1999)

 

62. The great body of managers…spend their whole careers climbing up inside one great Leviathan, with little contact with anyone outside.

Anthony Sampson (b.1926) British author and journalist. The Anatomy of Britain (1962)

 

63. I don’t think anyone can manage Apple.

John Sculley (b.1939) U.S. partner of Sculley Brothers, former president of Pepsi, and C.E.O. of Apple Computers. Fortune (1996)

 

64. One useful starting point for all managers is to look at their time for thinking.

Peter Singe (b.1947) U.S. academic and author. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990)

 

65. And I think one of the powers of fad surfing is that it really is a kind of managerial Prozac. It allows managers to say. I am doing something therefore I am managing and leading.

Eileen C. Shapiro, U.S. business consultant and author. Radio interview. “The Consultants: Fad Surfers of Globalisation” (August 3, 1997)

 

66. The consultants are the thinkers and the strategists. And the managers have the most bizarre job.

Eileen C. Shapiro, U.S. business consultant and author. Radio interview. “The Consultants: Fad Surfers of Globalisation” (August 3, 1997)

 

67. Thinking must be the hardest job in the world. What people want to do is outsource it to a mantra or a methodology like reengineering.

Eileen C. Shapiro, U.S. business consultant and author. Fad Surfing in the Boardroom (1998)

 

68. At best we live by homely proverbs, at worst we live by pompous inanities.

Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) U.S. political scientist and economist. Administrative Behavior (1947)

 

69. Management-the collective effort of intelligence, experience and imagination.

Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966) U.S. president of General Motors. Adventures of a White Collar Man (1941)

 

70. If we had the means to review and judge the effectiveness of operations, we could safely leave the prosecution of these operations to the men in charge of them.

Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966) U.S. president of General Motors. My Years with General Motors (1964)

 

71. Of all business activities, 99% are routine…The entire 100% can be handled by managing the 1% of exceptions.

Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966) U.S. president of General Motors. “The Most Important Things I Learned About Management,” System (August 1924)

 

72. The only report we ask from all of our units is one page a month.

Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966) U.S. president of General Motors. “The Most Important Things I Learned About Management,” System (August 1924)

 

73. Traditional management structures were devised when information was a scarce commodity, so that knowledge about how to run the business could be communicated layer by layer.

Raymond W. Smith (b.1937) U.S. chairman of Rothschild Inc. and former chairman of Bell Atlantic Corporation. Speech (October 17, 1995)

 

74. Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.

Casey Stengel (1890?-1975) U.S. baseball player and manager. Attrib.

 

75. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy; but good administration can never save bad policy.

Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-65) U.S. statesman and author. Speech, Los Angeles (September 11, 1952)

 

76. When the rats are running for cover, you must ensure that, as captain, you know what they are doing.

Dennis Stevenson (b.1946) British company director. Management Today (April 1999)

 

77. This blight is management-the dreaded four Ms, male, middle class, middle-aged and mediocre.

Janet Street-Porter (b.1946) British broadcaster. Referring to television management in the United Kingdom. MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh Television Festival, Scotland (August 1995)

 

78. First the gathering in on the part of management of all the knowledge…in the heads of the workmen; second, the scientific selection and progressive development of the workmen; third, the bringing together of the science and…the trained men; and fourth, the constant cooperation which always occurs between the management and the workmen.

  1. W. Taylor (1856-1915) U.S. engineer and author. Taylor’s four principles of “scientific management,” the basis of Henry Ford’s mass-production revolution.” Testimony to the House of Representatives, U.S. Congress (1912)

 

79. It is always easier to talk about change than to make it. It is easier to consult that to manage.

Alvin Toffler (b.1928) U.S. social commentator. The Adaptive Corporation (1985)

 

80. “Top” management is supposed to be a tree full of owls…hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest. I’m still unpersuaded they even know where the forest is.

Robert Townsend (b.1920) U.S. business executive and author. Further Up the Organization (1984)

 

81. I started wondering if any of the American management techniques I was brainwashed with in eight years of the best business education money could buy would apply in the Netherlands or indeed in the rest of the world.

Fons Trompenaars (b.1952) Dutch author and management consultant. Riding the Waves of Culture (1993)

 

82. Chinese management has its roots in ancient thinking and practices…it is characterized by teamwork, orientation around relationships, and multi-level regulations.

Zhong-Ming Wang, Chinese academic and business author. “Management in China,” Management in Asia Pacific (Malcolm Warner, ed.; 2000)

 

83. The formal Chinese accounting system was established around 475-221 B.C. and functioned primarily as a performance evaluation system, with indicators for promotion and demotion.

Zhong-Ming Wang, Chinese academic and business author. “Management in China,” Management in Asia Pacific (Malcolm Warner, ed.; 2000)

 

84. I want to begin with what I think is the most important factor: our respect for the individual. This is a simple concept, but in IBM it occupies a major portion of management time.

Thomas J. Watson, SR. (1874-1956) U.S. founder and president of IBM. Quoted in father, Son & Co: My Life at IBM and Beyond (Thomas J. Watson, JR and Peter Petre; 1990)

 

86. Frightened, nervous managers use thick, convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood.

Jack Welch (b.1935) U.S. former chairman and C.E.O. of General Electric. Harvard Business Review (September-October 1989)

 

87. People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t rocket science; we’ve chosen one of the world’s more simple professions.

Jack Welch (b.1935) U.S. former chairman and C.E.O. of General Electric. Harvard Business Review (September-October 1989)

 

88. Insecure managers create complexity.

Jack Welch (b.1935) U.S. former chairman and C.E.O. of General Electric. Quoted in In Search of European Excellence (Robert Heller; 1997)

 

89. one of the most important things about being a good manager is to rule with a heart. You have to know the business, but you also have to know what’s at the heart of the business and that’s people.

Oprah Winfrey (b.1954) U.S. talk show host, actor, and business executive. Quoted in The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey (Bill Adler; 1997)

 

90. You have to surround yourself with people you trust, and people that are good. But they also have to be people who will tell the emperor you have no clothes.

Oprah Winfrey (b.1954) U.S. talk show host, actor, and business executive. Quoted in The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey (Bill Adler; 1997)

 

91. The manager’s job is to thrive in a chaotic world he cannot control. He is at last reconciled to being, openly, an intermediary.

Theodore Zeldin (b.1933) British academic, author and historian. An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)