Management Quotes

I'm often called in as a coach and speaker to motivate staff, teams, the public and leaders. The key to this is simple; you cannot truly, deeply and sustainably motivate anybody until you know what their motives are...what motivates them...?

Rasheed Ogunlaru

It can be dangerous to be right at the outset. Managers in some LCD-first companies interpreted the pivot point as an unconditional endorsement of everything they had been doing. As a result, they failed to recognize the need to rethink some details of their technology, such as the importance of color displays, and their complacency helped former plasma companies pull ahead.

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.

When we think we can manage our time, our circumstances, and our relationships without His help and inspiration, we know what unmanageability is.

I am fascinated at how much time we spend doing things that we don’t enjoy.

Increasingly, management’s role is not to organize work, but to direct passion and purpose.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Vijay Dhameliya

Banishing those evil twins:-Talk about values-Don’t assume people understand your motives-Don’t be above explaining yourself-Dare to invite feedback-Understand the impact of good intention

The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.

John Bloomfield Jervis

I call these lessons ‘learned on the fly’ because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying to not lose sight of the ball or fail to notice the sensation of gravel from the warning track under his cleats as he knowingly approaches the blindside impact of an outfield wall. His focused intention guides him into trying to make the catch that will save the game for his team, his city and the harmony of the moment, despite the foreboding threat of a pending collision. Decisions in these situations are made in an instant. One weighs the purpose of the game, the success of the catch and one’s own safety of survival in a fleeting moment, and in all hopes one lives to tell about it in the glow of great success.

Michael Delaware

Wait. You work for me?""I prefer to think of it as managing your incompetence.

The Four Keys of Great Managers:1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination."2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps."3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses."4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.

Marcus Buckingham

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

Peter F Drucker

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.

Marcus Buckingham

People. Products. Profits. In that order.

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.

Marcus Buckingham

In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.

Marcus Buckingham

The moment you start building or doing stuff beyond your knowledge, soon you will end up by demanding time.

Ajeet Pratap Maurya

The rationales for centralized, to-down decision making - control, direction, and compliance - melts away when individuals are tightly aligned with the company's values and goals, accountable for their actions, and self-regulated.

Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much.Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.

Marcus Buckingham

Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.

Marcus Buckingham

In terms of organisational models and human relationship models, humankind has not evolved much over the last millennia.

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

One conclusion is becoming more and more evident: The primary focus of any manager should be to energize people, to make sure that they actually want to do all that stuff. And doing all that stuff requires motivation.

To build up people teach them to be administrators and managers.

Authenticity requires us to slow down. Fast times require us to slow down. To be effective, we need to slow down our pace of thought and action and focus on managing our attention. To be authentic leaders we need to act from intention and choice rather than from habit and impulse.

Technical staff were fairly good at estimation but were poor at defending their estimates

Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff.

Tina Fey

Interesting office management skills, kind of a 'violence is not the answer so I'm going to beat the shit out of you philosophy.

An effective leader is also an effective listener.

The leader is always learning new things and gaining new insights.

Digital organization is essentially a dynamic, people-centered ecosystem.

Pearl Zhu

inspect what you expect

Josh Kent

Molly. I have an opportunity for you.”“An opportunity?” I repeated, without enthusiasm. Oh, good. Next comes the part where he tells me to be a “team player” and then dumps some tedious task on me.“It’s a chance for you to show that you can be a team player,” Bill Vogel said.

I couldn’t bring myself to call him either “Bill,” which would signal friendly familiarity, or “Doctor Vogel,” which would imply respect.

A few of the managers we spoke with for this book worried that the tour of duty framework might give employees "permission" to leave. But permission is not yours to give or to withhold, and believing you have that power is simply a self-deception that leads to a dishonest relationship with your employees. Employees don't need your permission to switch companies, and if you try to assert that right, they'll simply make their move behind your back.

Great leaders catch and correct problems while they’re still small and able to be managed without a lot of hassle. If ignored too long, small problems will morph into much bigger issues that will require more time and effort and at a high cost, causing a great deal of disruption and stress.

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy.

To foster a solution mindset, tell employees that you are not interested in who or what caused the problem. You are only interested in hearing how we plan to go beyond the problem.

Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don't feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives.

Now If diversity were inherently good, inherently valuable, inherently wonderful, why would we have to have the highly-paid profession know as 'diversity consultant' to manage it? Things that are inherently good, to enjoy them, or to make the most of them, you don't need a consultant. You don't need a consultant to make the most out of good-tasting food, beautiful weather, the affection of your friends. Those are inherently good things. Diversity required consultants because diversity is hard. Diversity is difficult. It's because it's difficult for people to try to work, to act, and live together with people are are unlike themselves.

Leadership is the influence of a person(s) on another person(s) which guides their efforts in a specific direction, with more purpose, clarity, and unity than they would have held on their own.

Michael A. Wood Jr.

Effective managers proactively control their tasks and the expectations of their major stakeholders, which allows them to meet strategic goals rather than fight fires.

Sumantra Ghoshal

The customer always comes first.

Quality products and personalized attention secures retail customers.

Going out of the way for a customer increases sales.

Customer complaints need to be addressed effectively.

Your savings is your earning actually

Do not tend to hire only people who see what you see. Such a tendency may lead to a decline in operating profit, and even bankruptcy.

Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation.

If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.

This fits in with what I saw in staff in astronomical facilities and was reporting to the management team: 10-14% Oxygen: Emotional upset, abnormal fatigue, disturbed respiration.

A measured response trumps a triggered reaction every time. Breathe first.

A farmer's work is more like that of a horse trainer than a mechanic, more like that of a healer than a computer repairperson. It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant's or an animal's innate ability to do its own growing -- in the same way that the best horse trainers seek to draw out abilities already within their horses or in the way the best healers know when to stand back and let their patients' bodies do the work. There is mystery in farming.

If you do not manage things, be prepared to face the consequences.

The measures themselves are easily distorted to suit reporting purposes.

Good management has considerable impact on engagement levels of the employees and drives them towards excellent performances.

A wise manager knows that it is sometimes more important to listen than to talk.

Everything God has given to us is “for rent.” We can only manage what we have but the right of ownership belongs to God.

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