Selected management quotes

1. What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

2. I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

3. It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

4. Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

5. This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

6. Not even a great leader can get very far without great people to lead.

7. There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.

8. It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

9. I'm a terrible long-term planner.

10. Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.

11. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

12. Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.

13. I like my players to be married and in debt. That's the way you motivate them.

14. Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders.

15. There are always times where the place of a commander isn't back with his Major State, but onward with his troops.

16. It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.

17. My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty... it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

18. It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

19. The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.

20. Asking 'who ought to be the boss' is like asking 'who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?' Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.

21. The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

22. A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.

23. I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.

24. In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything.

25. Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.

26. An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

27. If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

28. Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today's world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.

29. Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

30. No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure. If he entrusts the details and smaller matters to subordinates constant errors will occur. I prefer to supervise the whole operations of the government myself rather than entrust the public business to subordinates, and this makes my duties very great.

31. Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.

32. The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

33. Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.

34. Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

35. Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

36. The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

37. Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

38. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

39. Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

40. That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.

41. A prince who will not undergo the difficulty of understanding must undergo the danger of trusting.

42. The people are never so perfectly backed, but that they will kick and fling if not stroked at seasonable times.

43. When I became president, I did not want to have a powerful chief of staff. Wilson had his Colonel House, Eisenhower his Sherman Adams, Nixon his Halderman, and I was aware of the trouble those top assistants had caused my predecessors.

44. Well, gentlemen, this matter has been a fiasco.

45. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

46. It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

47. There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

48. The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

49. I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

50. They that govern the most make the least noise.

51. The vote is the most effective and merciful instrument that man has devised to manage his affairs.

52. A great reserve and severity of manners are necessary for the command of those who are older than ourselves.

53. An army of sheep, led by a lion, is better than an army of lions, led by a sheep.[1]

54. I made all my generals out of mud.

55. Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.

56. The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

57. We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

58. A leader ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred.

59. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed. 'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-' 'Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I'll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won't puzzle him.

60. What happens when bosses ignore memos from subordinates? The country is now learning the answer to that question in a most painful way. On July 10, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix [Arizona] wrote a memo raising serious concerns about Middle Eastern men attending U.S. flight schools. The memo never made its way up the chain of command, and no action was taken. --Richard Behar, introd. to 'FBI's 'Phoenix' memo Unmasked', Fortune [date?], [date accessed?]. (See (incomplete) list of Behar's Fortune articles in his section of his Publications [some defunct links].)

61. A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

62. Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

63. Deliver us from committees.

64. 'Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.'

65. It's time to rethink the whole system of HMOs and managed care. This entire unnecessary level of corporatism rakes off profits and worsens the quality of care. But HMOs did not arise in the free market; they are creatures of government interference in health care dating to the 1970s. These non-market institutions have gained control over medical care through collusion between organized medicine, politicians, and drug companies, in an effort to move America toward 'free' universal health care.

66. The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!

67. I would like to create a speedier and more efficient system. Careers and reputations are at stake, and it would be good to be able to inject a sense of calm and transparency into procedures.

68. The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.

69. That's the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn't happen, doesn't happen.

70. It is the principle of necessity towards which, as to their ultimate centre, all the ideas advanced in this essay immediately converge. In abstract theory the limits of this necessity are determined solely by considerations of man's proper nature as a human being; but in the application we have to regard, in addition, the individuality of man as he actually exists. This principle of necessity should, I think, prescribe the grand fundamental rule to which every effort to act on human beings and their manifold relations should be invariably conformed. For it is the only thing which conducts to certain and unquestionable results. The consideration of the useful, which might be opposed to it, does not admit of any true and unswerving decision.

71. Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better

72. You're fired!