Quotes about management
page 6

Joe Jackson photo
Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. photo
Luther Burbank photo
Eugene Fama photo

“If active managers win, it has to be at the expense of other active managers. And when you add them all up, the returns of active managers have to be literally zero, before costs. Then after costs, it's a big negative sign”

Eugene Fama (1939) American economist and Nobel laureate in Economics

Cited in: Lawrence Delevingne. " Nobel winner Fama: Active management 'never' good. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102014057" at cnbc.com. 19 Sept. 2014.

Thomas Sowell photo
Warren Buffett photo
Dorothy Parker photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Walker Percy photo
Akio Morita photo
Zygmunt Vetulani photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“Let me deal here with what General Motors includes and with the responsibility that rests on its management.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934

Alex Ferguson photo
Rebecca Latimer Felton photo

“Savage tribes used physical force to manage their women. The club and the lash were their only arguments. Moslem fanatics go a step further in saying women have no souls.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

'Why I Am a Suffragist? essay, dated May 14, 1915. Cornerstones of Georgia History, p. 165 http://books.google.com/books?id=0qdkKS2F42MC&pg=PA165&lpg=PA165&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton+why+i+am+a+suffragist&source=bl&ots=B1fM_lWjgv&sig=bOmSGdPp921qKNy3TlmDU3uWaEc#v=onepage&q=rebecca%20latimer%20felton%20why%20i%20am%20a%20suffragist&f=false.

Joseph Strutt photo
Patrick Dixon photo
Ted Lindsay photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo

“I have just finished one painting and am already at work on the preliminary drawings for the next one. I must do something in order to get rid of such habits or I won't manage to find time for any vacation. I have had this new painting in my mind since January, and must get it down on canvas.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from his letter to Freundlich, 15 July 15, 1938; as cited in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944 - exhibition catalog, published by The Solomon K. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1985, p. 27
1930 - 1944

“Management tries to make the best use of the resources available.”

Edith Penrose (1914–1996) economist

Source: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 1959, p. 5

Alan Sillitoe photo

“Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion.”

Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) British writer

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1973] 1975) vol. 1, p. 337.
Criticism

Thomas Hughes photo

“Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over these despots.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 266; Cited in: Best (1990, p. 56).

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
N. Gregory Mankiw photo
Thaddeus Stevens photo

“All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

James A. Garfield, as quoted in Many Thoughts of Many Minds : A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896) edited by Louis Klopsch, p. 116
Misattributed

“The higher people get, the more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.”

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) American psychologist

Summer notes on social psychology of industry and management at Non-Linear Systems, inc., Del Mar, California, ‎Non-Linear Systems, Inc, 1962, p. 81.
1940s-1960s

William Saroyan photo
Hermann Hesse photo

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

Lyndall Urwick photo

“Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution…
What Taylor did was not to invent something quite new, but to synthesise and present as a reasonably coherent whole ideas which had been germinating and gathering force in Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. He gave to a disconnected series of initiatives and experiments a philosophy and a title; complete unity was not within his scope… It was left to others to extend his philosophy to other functions and especially to Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, to develop logical principles for the administration of a large-scale undertaking as a whole.
It detracts nothing from Taylor's greatness to see him thus as a man who focussed his thought of the preceding age, carried that thought forward with a group of friends and colleagues whose united contribution was so outstanding as to constitute a "golden age" of management in the United States and laid the intellectual foundations on which all subsequent work in Great Britain and many other countries has been based. But it is impossible to understand Taylor's achievement or the significance of Scientific Management for our society, unless his individual work is seen against the background of this larger whole of which it is only a part.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol I. p. 16-17; as cited in: Harry Arthur Hopf. Historical perspectives in management https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009425985. Ossining, N.Y., 1947. p. 4-5
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Roberto Clemente photo
Peter D. Schiff photo
Don Tapscott photo
Daniel Drezner photo
James A. Garfield photo

“All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

Letter to B. A. Hinsdale, (21 April 1880), in The Nation's Hero — In Memoriam : The Life of James Abram Garfield (1881) by J. M. Bundy, p. 216 http://books.google.com/books?id=mlTUAAAAMAAJ
1880s

Amir Taheri photo
Babe Ruth photo
W. Edwards Deming photo
Henri Fayol photo

“Management plays a very important part in the government of undertakings: of all undertakings, large or small, industrial, commercial, political, religious or other. I intend to set forth my ideas here on the way in which that part should be played.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: General and industrial management, 1919/1949, p.xxi cited in: Harold R. Pollard (1974) Developments in management thought. p. 88

“If management can identify the negatives of its preferred option, the other policies around the star model can be designed to counter the negatives while achieving the positives.”

Jay R. Galbraith (1939–2014) American business theorist

Jay R. Galbraith (2002), Designing organizations: an executive guide to strategy, structure, and process. p. 15

Adrian Slywotzky photo
Patrick Modiano photo
Théodore Rousseau photo
Bram van Velde photo

“The greatest moment is when you realize that the painting you've just finished is nothing. When you manage to detach yourself from it.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

David Allen photo

“What people call an "Interruption" is simply new input inappropriately managed.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

19 June 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/2240630593
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“What seems to emerge is not a moral reprimand of the management scientist, but rather a moral problem of the profession, a wicked moral problem.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, Guest editorial: Wicked problems (1967), p. 142 cited in: Rob Hundman (2010) Weerbarstig veranderen. p. 38

Frederick Buechner photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Catherine the Great photo
Uladzimir Nyaklyayew photo
Glen Cook photo
Bill Clinton photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

“There are two dominant mindsets in the world of business or any kind of organization.One is a productive mindset, and it says it's a good idea to seek valid knowledge, it's a good idea to craft your conversations so you make explicit what you are thinking and trying to examine. You craft them in such a way that you can test, as clearly as you can, the validity of your claims. Truth is a good idea. All the managerial functions—accounting, all of them—have a fundamental notion that the productive mindset is what ought to be used to manage human beings.Then there's another mindset I call the defensive mindset. The idea is that even if you are seeking valid knowledge, you are seeking only that kind of valid knowledge that protects yourself or your organization or your department—it is defensive. From a defensive mindset point of view, truth is a good idea when it isn't threatening or upsetting. If it is, massage it, spin it. But if you massage it and spin it, you're violating the espoused theory of good management. When you spin, you have to cover up the fact that you're spinning. And in order for a cover up to work, it too has to be covered up.”

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

Chris Argyris (2004) in: " Surfacing Your Underground Organization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4456.html" on hbswk.hbs.edu by Mallory Stark, 11/1/2004

John Rabe photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo
Smita Nair Jain photo
Frederick Winslow Taylor photo
Adolf A. Berle photo
Colin Powell photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo
Ricardo Sanchez photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Lewis M. Branscomb photo
Emma Thompson photo

“(Enterprise Architecture is) the set of descriptive representations (i. e., models) that are relevant for describing an Enterprise such that it can be produced to management's requirements (quality) and maintained over the period of its useful life.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman (1987) cited in: Antonio Laganà, Marina L. Gavrilova, Vipin Kumar (2004) Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2004. p. 604

John Ralston Saul photo
Regina E. Dugan photo

“The DARPA model has three elements:
Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.
Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.
Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

“Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems (2013)

Francis Escudero photo
Joseph M. Juran photo
Mary Parker Follett photo

“One of the most interesting things about business to me is that I find so many business men who are willing to try experiments. I should like to tell you about two evenings I spent last winter and the contrast between them. I went one evening to a drawing-room meeting where economists and M. Ps. talked of current affairs, of our present difficulties. It all seemed a little vague to me, did not seem really to come to grips with our problem. The next evening it happened that I went to a dinner of twenty business men who were discussing the question of centralization and decentralization. Each one had something to add from his own experience of the relation of branch firms to the central office, and the other problems included in the subject. There I found L hope for the future. There men were not theorizing or dogmatizing; they were thinking of what they had actually done and they were willing to try new ways the next morning, so to speak. Business, because it gives us the opportunity of trying new roads, of blazing new trails, because, in short, it is pioneer work, pioneer work in the organized relations of human beings, seems to me to offer as thrilling an experience as going into a new country and building railroads over new mountains. For whatever problems we solve in business management may help towards the solution of world problems, since the principles of organization and administration which are discovered as best for business can be applied to government or international relations. Indeed, the solution of world problems must eventually be built up from all the little bits of experience wherever people are consciously trying to solve problems of relation. And this attempt is being made more consciously and deliberately in industry than anywhere else.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xxi-xxii

Donald A. Schön photo

“Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.”

Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) American academic

Donald Schon " REITH LECTURES 1970: Change and Industrial Society: Lecture 1: The Loss of the Stable State http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1970_reith1.pdf" at the BBC, 15 November 1970 – Radio 4; cited in: Richard Duane Carter (1981) Future challenges of management education. p. 102

Hugo Diemer photo
Howard Scott photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Roberto Clemente photo
Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex photo

“A good household manager, but not fit to meddle in the affairs of kings.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Henry VIII to the French ambassador, May 1538.
About

“A stochastic process is about the results of convolving probabilities-which is just what management is about, as well.”

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

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 2, Chance, Risk and Malice, p. 58

Edmund Phelps photo