Top down implies scope - that is, looking at the business as a whole as opposed to looking at pieces or subparts of it.
Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982
Source: Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982, p. 31
Source: The New Canada (1992), Chapter Thirteen, The Eventful Summer of 1990, p. 240
“Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”
Source: No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks
War As I Knew It (1947); also quoted in Patton's One-Minute Messages: Tactical Leadership Skills for Business Management (1995) by Charles M. Province, p. 88
Context: There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.
“That change didn't happen from the top down, but it happened from the bottom up.”
2017, Farewell to Staff Members (January 2017)
Context: That change didn't happen from the top down, but it happened from the bottom up. It was met sometimes with skepticism and doubt. Some folks didn't think we could pull it off. There were those that felt that the institutions of power and privilege in this country were too deeply entrenched. And yet, all of you came together in small towns and big cities, a whole bunch of you really young, and you decided to believe and you knocked on doors and you made phone calls and you talked to your parents who didn't know how to pronounce Barack Obama. And you got to know each other. And you went into communities that maybe you had never even thought about visiting and met people that on the surface seemed completely different than you -- didn't look like you or talk like you or watch the same TV programs as you. And yet, once you started talking to them, it turned out that you had something in common. And it grew and it built. And people took notice. And throughout, it was infused with a sense of hope. As I said in 2004, it wasn't blind optimism that drove you to do all of this work. It wasn't naiveté. It wasn't willful ignorance to all the challenges that America faces. It was hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. You proved the power of hope.
“Written history, like the missionary position, is an act executed from the top looking down.”
The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (Simon & Schuster, 1997)
Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 16.
[NewsBank, 3, Sarah Whitman, Age-old feud: In the beginning, Tampa Bay Times, Florida, February 7, 2014]
Quoted in Matt Seaton, "I feel used," The Guardian, 16 October 2003
As quoted in Tampa Bay Magazine (January/February 2008), p. 205
