Top Management Quotes

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

It is most important that top management be quality-minded. In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below.

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach.

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.

You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.

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

When you don't know what you're doing, fake it.

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.

Make your top managers rich and they will make you rich.

It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to - that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.

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.

The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!

What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage.

Real management is developing people through work.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas.

"Top" management is supposed to be a tree full of owls-hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest. I'm still unpersuaded they even know where the forest is.

One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.

Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions.

. . . top management should spend 40 to 50 percent of its time educating and motivating its people . . .

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

I basically see two reasons for a going public: Glencore gets access to more money. It is a way of funding your business and to finance growth. Plus: You have more liquid shares. It is easier to leave the company and redeem your shares. The 'going public' may also be an exit strategy for the top management.

Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.

In reality, that was going to be very messy from an antitrust standpoint and meet a lot of resistance from the top management at Hasbro. That was a whole different story.

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.