“The typical organization is hierarchical, with workers answering to a manager, and that manager answering to a still-higher manager, and so on. The value of such hierarchies is obvious-it vastly simplifies communication among the employees. New employees need only one connection, to their boss, to get started. That's much simpler than trying to have everyone talk to everyone.”

— Clay Shirky

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 29

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The typical organization is hierarchical, with workers answering to a manager, and that manager answering to a still-hi…" by Clay Shirky?

Clay Shirky 19

American technology writer 1964

Related quotes

“satisfying shareholders and employees; labor and management.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: L’exposé des principes généraux d’administration, 1908, p. 911

“Every employee in an undertaking — workman, foreman, shop manager, head of division, head of department, manager, and if it is a state enterprise the series extends to the minister or head of a state department — takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. By administrative knowledge we mean planning, organization, command, coordination, and control: it can be elementary for the workman, but must be very wide in the case of employees of high rank, especially managers of big concerns. Everyone has some need of administrative knowledge.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 10; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 4-5

“The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 130.

“A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

A manager develops people.
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 344

“The best company management is one that combines a sense of corporate greatness and destiny, with empathy for - and fidelity to - the average employee.”

David Packard (1912–1996) American electrical engineer, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, businessman, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense,…

Source: Bill & Dave, 2007, p. 393

“Of what value is the study of management?
The study of management has been omitted from the student's training until comparatively recently, for a very different reason than was psychology. It was never doubted that a knowledge of management would be of great value to anyone and everyone, and many were the queer schemes for obtaining that knowledge after graduation. It was doubted that management could be studied otherwise than by observation and practice. Few teachers, if any, believed in the existence, or possibility, of a teaching science of management. Management was assumed by many to be an art, by even more it was thought to be a divinely bestowed gift or talent, rather than an acquired accomplishment. It was common belief that one could learn to manage only by going out on the work and watching other managers, or by trying to manage, and not by studying about management in a class room or in a text book; that watching a good manager might help one, but no one could hope really to succeed who had not " the knack born in him."”

Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972) American psychologist and industrial engineer

Source: Psychology of management, 1914, p. 2-3

“A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1990s and later, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992), p. 139

“As for the employees, the payment in stock options revives, somewhat ironically, the old anarchist ideology of self-management of the company, as they are co-owners, co-producers, and co-managers of the firm.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 92

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 2, “Pointing the Finger” (p. 32)

“The hotels are entirely run by the Moscow Soviet, which seems to have picked its employees rather for their political reliability than for their experience or cleverness at hotel management.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "The New Russia" 1928, p. 25

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Clay Shirky 19

Related quotes

Related topics