Quotes about management
page 11

L. David Mech photo

“Wolves should be saved and managed as part of the whole context, not because they are singled out as a special species.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Ted Malloch photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 398

Wisława Szymborska photo
Igor Ansoff photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo
Arno Gruen photo
Erik Naggum photo
Will Cuppy photo

“We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman, "Managerial acceptance of scientific recommendations" in California Management Review, Vol 7 (1964), p. 33; cited in Management Systems (1971), by Peter P. Schoderbek, p. 199
1960s - 1970s

Margaret Mead photo
Stephen King photo
Ludwig Van Beethoven photo

“One cannot help but be struck by the diversity that characterizes efforts to study the management process. If it is true that psychologists like to study personality traits in terms of a person's reactions to objects and events, they could not choose a better stimulus than management science. Some feel it is a technique, some feel it is a branch of mathematics, or of mathematical economics, or of the "behavioral sciences," or of consultation services, or just so much nonsense. Some feel it is for management (vs. labor), some feel it ought to be for the good of mankind — or for the good of underpaid professors.
But this diversity of attitude, which is really characteristic of all fields of endeavor, is matched by another and more serious kind of diversity. In the management sciences, we have become used to talking about game theory, inventory theory, waiting line theory. What we mean by "theory" in this context is that if certain assumptions are valid, then such-and-such conclusions follow. Thus inventory theory is not a set of statements that predict how inventories will behave, or even how they should behave in actual situations, but is rather a deductive system which becomes useful if the assumptions happen to hold. The diversity of attitude on this point is reflected in two opposing points of view: that the important problems of management science are theoretical, and that the important problems are factual.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

quote in: Fremont A. Shull (ed.), Selected readings in management https://archive.org/stream/selectedreadings00shul#page/n13/mode/2up, , 1957. p. 7-8
1940s - 1950s, "Management Science — Fact or Theory?" 1956

Walker Percy photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 43

Arsène Wenger photo

“Everybody has a different opinion in this league and nobody is a prophet. I personally don’t know who will win the league. I managed 1,600 games so, if Nani knows, he must be 1,600 times more intelligent than I am.”

Arsène Wenger (1949) French footballer and manager

About Nani, (December 2010) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/arsenal/8222215/Arsene-Wenger-mocks-Nani-for-dismissing-Arsenals-Premier-League-title-chances.html

David Crystal photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
W. Edwards Deming photo
Clay Shirky photo

“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.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 236; as cited in: Edward D. Garten, ‎Delmus E. Williams (2008) Advances in Library Administration and Organization. p. 51

Carl R. Rogers photo
Giorgio Morandi photo
Colin Powell photo

“Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

2000s, The Powell Principles (2003)

Dana White photo

“A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Edgar H. Schein (2010). Dec Is Dead, Long Live Dec: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equiment Corporation. p. 60

Samuel Butler photo

“Sketching from nature is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Sketching from Nature
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Maimónides photo
Zygmunt Bauman photo

“Pascal suggests that people avoid looking inwards and keep running in the vain hope of escaping a face-to-face encounter with their predicament, which is to face up to their utter insignificance whenever they recall the infinity of the universe. And he censures them and castigates them for doing so. It is, he says, that morbid inclination to hassle around rather than stay put which ought to be blamed for all unhappiness. One could, however, object that Pascal, even if only implicitly, does not present us with the choice between a happy and an unhappy life, but between two kinds of unhappiness: whether we choose to run or stay put, we are doomed to be unhappy. The only (putative and misleading!) advantage of being on the move (as long as we keep moving) is that we postpone for a while the moment of that truth. This is, many would agree, a genuine advantage of running out of rather than staying in our rooms—and most certainly it is a temptation difficult to resist. And they will choose to surrender to that temptation, allow themselves to be allured and seduced—if only because as long as they remain seduced they will manage to stave off the danger of discovering the compulsion and addiction that prompts them to run, screened by what is called “freedom of choice” or “self-assertion.””

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

But, inevitably, they will end up longing for the virtues they once possessed but have now abandoned for the sake of getting rid of the agony which practicing them, and taking responsibility for that practice, might have caused.
Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 37.

Richard Matheson photo
Mary Wollstonecraft photo
Anastacia photo
Clinton Edgar Woods photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Charles Stross photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo
Garth Nix photo
Gene Wolfe photo
Benjamin Graham photo
Nick Zedd photo
William H. Starbuck photo
Bill Shankly photo

“At a football club, there's a holy trinity – the players, the manager and the supporters.”

Bill Shankly (1913–1981) Scottish footballer and manager

"Bill Shankly: Life, death and football" http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/oct/18/bill-shankly-liverpool-manager, The Guardian (2009-10-18)

Raghuram G. Rajan photo

“Not taking risks one doesn't understand is often the best form of risk management.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

From his book: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (2010) https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Fault_Lines.html?id=2RB3j_YfEg0C

Connie Willis photo
Mircea Eliade photo
Ed Yourdon photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Benjamin Graham photo

“Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 44

“The strategies that managers employ are at least as important as the facilities at their disposal.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 1, Processes and Policies, p. 27.

Henry R. Towne photo
Walker Percy photo
Jack McDevitt photo
Norman Thomas photo
Henry Mintzberg photo
Joel Bakan photo

“Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 2, Business As Usual, p. 36

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

Harold Geneen (1910–1997) American businessman

Managing, Chapter Five (Management Must Manage), p. 86.

Carl von Clausewitz photo
Ian Brown photo

“We broke up mostly because we didn't have a manager and everyone was on different drugs. I don't take them so it was a bit weird for me.”

Ian Brown (1963) English musician and singer of The Stone Roses

" Ex-Stone Roses vocalist produces 1st solo album http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=PcVIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CYIMAAAAIBAJ&pg=1480,1694681&dq=ian-brown&hl=en", The Vindicator, 5 September 1998, retrieved 2011-08-14

Henry Mintzberg photo
Frank Johnson Goodnow photo
Fred Brooks photo
Warren Buffett photo

“An irresistible footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities — at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1978 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1978.html
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Gary Hamel photo

“Our fifth premise is that the resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Source: Competing for the Future, 1996, p. 174

Kumar Sangakkara photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Juan Ramón Jimenéz photo

“Systems analysis, conceived in a policy sciences framework, is the macro instrument of the systems manager for understanding, evaluating and improving human systems — which are defined as goal oriented interdependent units incorporating people, organization and some form of technology for control, administration or output.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Richard F. Ericson (1979) Improving the human condition: quality and stability in social systems : proceedings of the Silver Anniversary International Meeting, London, England, August 20-24, 1979. Society for General Systems Research. p. 621

Calvin Coolidge photo
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo

“To some this may appear to be a small matter, but to Mr. Harry Hook, it is very important. He is a street trader in the Barnsley Market. He has been trading there for some six years without any complaint being made against him; but, nevertheless, he has now been banned from trading in the market for life. All because of a trifling incident. On Wednesday, October 16, 1974, the market was closed at 5:30. So were all the lavatories, or 'toilets' as they are now called. They were locked up. Three quarters of an hour later, at 6:20, Harry Hook had an urgent call of nature. He wanted to relieve himself. He went into a side street near the market and there made water, or 'urinated' as it is now said. No one was about except one or two employees of the council, who were cleaning up. They rebuked him. He said: 'I can do it here if I like'. They reported him to a security officer who came up. The security officer reprimanded Harry Hook. We are not told the words used by the security officer. I expect they were in language which street traders understand. Harry Hook made an appropriate reply. Again, we are not told the actual words, but it is not difficult to guess. I expect it was an emphatic version of 'You be off'. At any rate, the security officer described them as words of abuse. Touchstone would say that the security officer gave the 'reproof valiant' and Harry Hook gave the 'counter-check quarrelsome'; As You Like It, Act V, Scene IV. On Thursday morning the security officer reported the incident. The market manager thought it was a serious matter. So he saw Mr. Hook the next day, Friday, October 18. Mr. Hook admitted it and said he was sorry for what had happened. The market manager was not satisfied to leave it there. He reported the incident to the chairman of the amenity services committee of the Council. He says that the chairman agreed that 'staff should be protected from such abuse.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

That very day the market manager wrote a letter to Mr. Hook, banning him from trading in the market.
Ex Parte Hook [1976] 1 WLR 1052 at 1055.
Judgments

Dana Gioia photo
Steven Erikson photo
Voltairine de Cleyre photo
Saki photo
Casey Stengel photo

“The key to good management is keeping the nine guys who hate your guts away from the nine guys who haven't made up their minds.”

Casey Stengel (1890–1975) American baseball player and coach

Common Ground News http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=2316&lan=en&sid=1&sp=0

José Mourinho photo

“Since the great days of Jimmy Greaves, it's the only time anyone's managed to score five times in a Chelsea shirt.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

"The wit and wisdom of Tony Banks" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4593562.stm, BBC News, 8 January 2006.
after a kiss-and-tell story appeared detailing how former Conservative minister David Mellor, his close friend and fellow Chelsea fan, wore football kit during sex.