Quotes about management

A memorandum is not written to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.

— Dean Acheson

Hire the best. Pay them fairly. Communicate frequently. Provide challenges and rewards. Believe in them. Get out of their way and they'll knock your socks off.

— Mary Ann Allison

If sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.

— Norman Augustine

If you want to give a man credit, put it in writing. If you want to give him hell, do it on the phone.

— Charles Beacham

A man is known by the company he organizes.

— Ambrose Bierce

For a manager to be perceived as a positive manager, they need a four to one positive to negative contact ratio.

— Ken Blanchard

As a manager the important thing is not what happens when you are there, but what happens when you are not there.

— Ken Blanchard

There is no class of people so hard to manage in a state, as those whose intentions are honest, but whose consciences are bewitched.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Incidents should not govern policy; but, policy incidents.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

They that crouch to those who are above them, always trample on those who are below them.

— George Earle Buckle

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

— Warren Buffett

A good manager is a man who isn't worried about his own career but rather the careers of those who work for him. My advice: Don't worry about yourself. Take care of those who work for you and you'll float to greatness on their achievements.

— H.S.M. Burns

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

— Joseph Conrad

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

— Stephen R. Covey

The ability to manage well doesn't make much difference if you're not even in the right jungle.

— Stephen R. Covey

We are now in the third stage of the industrial revolution. The first involved machines which extended human muscle; the second used machines to extend the human nervous system (radio, television, telephones); the third is now utilizing machines which extend the human mind-computers. About half of all service workers (43 percent of the labor force by 2000) will be involved in collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or retrieving information... By 1995, 80 percent of all management will be knowledge workers.

— Owen Davies

To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them.

— Benjamin Disraeli

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

— Peter F. Drucker

Management by objective works -- if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

— Peter F. Drucker

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

— Peter F. Drucker

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

— Peter F. Drucker

The manager with the in basket problem does not yet understand that he must discipline himself to take care of activities that fail to excite him.

— Pricilla Elfrey

The Trojans lost the war because they fell for a really dumb trick. hey, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside and all the Greeks have left. Let's bring it inside! Not a formula for long-term survival. Now if they had formed a task force to study the Trojan Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been massacred.. Who says middle management is useless?

— Adam C. Engst

A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster.

— Edward Esber

Pay your people the least possible and you'll get from them the same.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.

— Stephen Fry

If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

If each one does their duty as an individual and if each one works in their own proper vocation, it will be right with the whole.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Who can direct when all pretend to know?

— Oliver Goldsmith

I've been promoted to middle management. I never thought I'd sink so low.

— Tim Gould

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

— Thomas Hardy

Effective managers live in the present but concentrate on the future.

— James L. Hayes

The only time some people work like a horse is when the boss rides them.

— Gabriel Heatter

The difference between management and administration(which is what the bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.

— Robert Heller

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

— Robert Heller

Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relationships with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first line attention.

— William Hewlitt

You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people.

— Admiral Grace Hopper

The one word that makes a good manager -- decisiveness.

— Lee Iacocca

Management is nothing more than motivating other people.

— Lee Iacocca

The greatest manager has a knack for making ballplayers think they are better than they think they are.

— Reggie Jackson

Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. Squeeze too hard and you kill it, not hard enough and it flies away.

— Tommy Lasorda

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative and it's essential that we have many people with initiative if we're to continue to grow.

— Lewis Lehr

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

— Sinclair Lewis

Every time I appoint someone to a vacant position, I make a hundred unhappy and one ungrateful.

— Louis XIV

Any manager who can't get along with a .400 hitter is crazy.

— Joe Mccarthy

Man is the principal syllable in Management.

— C. T. Mckenzie

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money-maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend, and may leave behind him an exhausted industry and a legacy of industrial hatred. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world. I often wonder what strange cud such men sit chewing when their working days are over, and the accumulating riches of the mind have eluded them.

— Robert Menzies

Good managers have a bias for action.

— Thomas J. Peters

Not to watch your workmen is to lose your money.

— Spanish Proverb

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere.

— Ronald Reagan

I would rather have a first-class manager running a second-rate business than a second-rate manager running a first-rate business.

— Jack E. Reichert

Management must speak with one voice. When it doesn't management itself becomes a peripheral opponent to the team's mission.

— Pat Riley

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

— John D. Rockefeller

Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

— Saying

Remember that when an employee enters your office, they are in a strange land.

— Erwin H. Schell

They that govern the most make the least noise.

— John Selden

Management's job is to see the company not as it is... but as it can become.

— John W. Teets

Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

A good manager doesn't try to eliminate conflict; he tries to keep it from wasting the energies of his people. If you're the boss and your people fight you openly when they think that you are wrong -- that's healthy.

— Robert Townsend

A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment.

— Harry S Truman

Successful Project Management: PLAN, EXECUTE, EVALUATE Sounds simple, but most projects aren't well planned nor are they evaluated well. The tendency is to jump right into execution and as soon as execution is completed (which usually isn't soon), move on to the next project without evaluating what happen on the present project and what could have been improved. Successful project management requires more front and back end resources (and less middle) than are usually allocated.

— Source Unknown

If you want to manage somebody, manage yourself. Do that well and you'll be ready to stop managing. And start leading.

— Source Unknown

An executive is someone who talks with visitors so the other employees can get their work done.

— Source Unknown

A manager is an assistant to his men.

— Thomas J. Watson

I head a nation of a million presidents.

— Chaim. Weizmann

An overburdened, over-stretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people

— Jack Welch