1.
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
W. Edwards Deming
If you cannot express what you are doing as a sequence, then your understanding is incomplete.
2.
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
W. Edwards Deming
It is not obligatory to adapt. Endurance is not obligatory.
3.
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.
Joseph M. Juran
It is essential that upper-echelon leadership be committed to excellence. Without genuine display of concern from the summit, little progress will be made below.
4.
Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.
William Penn
We yearn for time intensely, yet we squander it haphazardly.
5.
Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
Henry Mintzberg
6.
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.
Lee Iacocca
7.
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.
Paul Hawken
8.
You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.
Paul Stanley
9.
Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
John D. Rockefeller
10.
When you don't know what you're doing, fake it.
Jill Shalvis
11.
To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.
Douglas Conant
12.
In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.
Tina Fey
14.
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.
W. Edwards Deming
15.
The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!
W. Edwards Deming
16.
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.
Jack Welch
17.
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.
Peter Drucker
18.
Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.
Peter Drucker
19.
The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage.
C. K. Prahalad
21.
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success
Stephen Covey
22.
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.
David Ogilvy
23.
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.
Jack Welch
24.
"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.
Robert Townsend
25.
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.
Bill Ford
26.
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.
Warren G. Bennis
27.
. . . top management should spend 40 to 50 percent of its time educating and motivating its people . . .
Buck Rodgers
28.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
Gary Hamel
29.
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.
Peter Drucker
30.
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.
Marc Rich
31.
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.
Peter Drucker
32.
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.
Harold L. Vogel
33.
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.
Ann Coulter