"Every business has its own particular sort of rat holes, through which its profits are carried piecemeal, and in quantities hardly noticeable at the time, but which aggregate thousands every year. The best way to plug these sources of loss is by accumulating data in regard to them and then keeping this data prominently before the executive." (Allan C Haskell, "How to Make and Use Graphic Charts", 1919)
"Business executives cannot afford to ignore the merits of graphical representation which have for so long been accepted by the engineer and man of science. They must look behind the graphical method and study the conditions leading to the picture along with the picture itself. No business is too small to profit by an examination which shall analyze and scrutinize nor too large to ignore its possibilities. Each business must adjust the graphical methods to its own peculiarities and each diagram must be adjusted to the individual for whom it is prepared or the individual must be educated up to the use and importance of these methods of analysis." (William C Marshall, "Graphical methods for schools, colleges, statisticians, engineers and executives", 1921)
"The fine art of executive decision consists in not deciding questions that are not now pertinent, in not deciding prematurely, in not making decision that cannot be made effective, and in not making decisions that others should make. Not to decide questions that are not pertinent at the time is uncommon good sense, though to raise them may be uncommon perspicacity. Not to decide questions prematurely is to refuse commitment of attitude or the development of prejudice. Not to make decisions that cannot be made effective is to refrain from destroying authority. Not to make decisions that others should make is to preserve morale, to develop competence, to fix responsibility, and to preserve authority.
From this it may be seen that decisions fall into two major classes, positive decisions - to do something, to direct action, to cease action, to prevent action; and negative decisions, which are decisions not to decide. Both are inescapable; but the negative decisions are often largely unconscious, relatively nonlogical, "instinctive," "good sense." It is because of the rejections that the selection is good." (Chester I Barnard, "The Functions of the Executive", 1938)
"Centralized controls are designed to ensure that the chief executive can find out how well the delegated authority and responsibility are being exercised." (Ernest Dale, "Management: Theory and practice", 1965)
"In large-scale organizations, the factual approach must be constantly nurtured by high-level executives. The more layers of authority through which facts must pass before they reach the decision maker, the greater the danger that they will be suppressed, modified, or softened, so as not to displease the 'brass"' For this reason, high-level executives must keep reaching for facts or soon they won't know what is going on. Unless they make visible efforts to seek and act on facts, major problems will not be brought to their attention, the quality of their decisions will decline, and the business will gradually get out of touch with its environment." (Marvin Bower, "The Will to Manage", 1966)
"As in war, strategic success depends on tactical effectiveness, and no degree of planning can lessen management's tactical imperatives. The first responsibility of the executive, anyway, is to the here and now. If he makes a shambles of the present, there may be no future; and the real purpose of planning - the one whose neglect is common, but poisonous - is to safeguard and sustain the company in subsequent short-run periods." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"How executives plan or what numbers they choose doesn't count; what does is the standard of performance they are ready to exact. The essence of any objective is that reaching it should be reasonable. The precondition is that you expect it to be met."
"The dogma of delegation is simple - the Sixth Truth of Management again: either the delegatee is capable of running the operation successfully by himself or he isn't. This handy formula relieves the top executive of any responsibility except that of finding, supervising, and (at the appropriate time) moving the men who are doing all the work. He Can then truly manage by exception: he does not get worked up over operations that are going well, but concentrates on the plague spots, where everything, including the management, is going badly."
"Management theory is obsessed with risks. Top executives bemoan the lack of risk-taking initiative among their young. Politicians and stockholders are advised (by directors) to make directors rich, so that they can afford to take risks. Theorists teach how to construct decision trees, heraldic devices of scientific management; and how to marry the trees with probability theory, so that the degree of risk along each branch (each branch and twig representing alternative results of alternative courses of action) can be metered. But the measuring is spurious, and, anyway, the best management doesn't take risks. It avoids them. It goes for the sure thing.
"The acceptance of project management has not been easy, however. Many executives are not willing to accept change and are inflexible when it comes to adapting to a different environment." (Harold Kerzner, "Project Management", 1979)
"[Organizational] change is intervention, and intervention even with good intentions can lead to negative results in both the short and long run. For example, a change in structure in going from application of one theory to another might cause the unwanted resignation of a key executive, or the loss of an important customer. [...] the factor of change, acts as an overriding check against continual organizational alterations. It means that regardless of how well meant a change is, or how much logic dictates this change, its possible negative effects must be carefully weighed against the hoped-for benefits." (William A Cohen, "Principles of Technical Management", 1980)
"Superordinate goals - the goals above all others [..] play a pragmatic role by influencing implementation at the operational level. Because an executive cannot be everywhere at once, many decisions are made without his knowledge. What superordinate goals do, in effect, is provide employees with a "compass" and point their footsteps in the right direction [... to] independent decisions." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)
"Executives have to start understanding that they have certain legal and ethical responsibilities for information under their control." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)
"Management: The definition that includes all the other definitions in this book and which, because of that, is the most general and least precise. Its concrete, people meaning - the board of directors and all executives with the power to make decisions - is no problem, except for the not-so-little matter of where to draw the line between managers who are part of 'the management' and managers who are not. (Robert Heller, "The Pocket Manager", 1987)
"Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example." (Edward L Hennessy Jr., The New York Times, 1988)
"With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization." (Warren G Bennis, "Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics, and Ecology", 1994)
"There is no such thing as a standard enterprise architecture. Enterprise design is as unique as a human fingerprint, because enterprise differ in how they function. Adopting an enterprise architecture is therefore one of the most urgent tasks for top executive management. Fundamentally, and information framework is a political doctrine for specifying as to who will have what information to make timely decisions." (Paul A Strassmann, "The politics of information management: policy guidelines", 1995)
"The Balanced Scorecard has its greatest impact when it is deployed to drive organizational change. [...] The Balanced Scorecard is primarily a mechanism for strategy implementation, not for strategy formulation. It can accommodate either approach for formulating business unit strategy-starting from the customer perspective, or starting from excellent internal-business-process capabilities. For whatever approach that SBU senior executives use to formulate their strategy, the Balanced Scorecard will provide an invaluable mechanism for translating that strategy into specific objectives, measures, and targets, and monitoring the implementation of that strategy during subsequent periods." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)
"Without meaningful data there can be no meaningful analysis. The interpretation of any data set must be based upon the context of those data. Unfortunately, much of the data reported to executives today are aggregated and summed over so many different operating units and processes that they cannot be said to have any context except a historical one - they were all collected during the same time period. While this may be rational with monetary figures, it can be devastating to other types of data." (Donald J Wheeler, "Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos" 2nd Ed., 2000)
"Project failures are not always the result of poor methodology; the problem may be poor implementation. Unrealistic objectives or poorly defined executive expectations are two common causes of poor implementation. Good methodologies do not guarantee success, but they do imply that the project will be managed correctly." (Harold Kerzner, "Strategic Planning for Project Management using a Project Management Maturity Model", 2001)
"We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little." (Mario Bunge, "Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction", 2001)
"Organizations face challenges of all kinds after activating their new systems. To be sure, these challenges are typically not as significant as those associated with going live. Still, executives and end users should never assume that system activation means that everyone is home free. Systems are hardly self-sufficient, and issues always appear." (Phil Simon, "Why New Systems Fail: An Insider’s Guide to Successful IT Projects", 2010)
"[Executives] make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns - or even to be completed." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)
"Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired." (Duff McDonald, "The Firm", 2014)
"Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake. Decisions are made at every level of the organization, beginning with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors. These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization." (Zach Gemignani et al, "Data Fluency", 2014)
"In order to cultivate a culture of accountability, first it is essential to assign it clearly. People ought to clearly know what they are accountable for before they can be held to it. This goes beyond assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs). To be accountable for an outcome, we need authority for making decisions, not just responsibility for execution. It is tempting to refrain from the tricky exercise of explicitly assigning accountability. Executives often hope that their reports will figure it out. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Strategic coherence is more important than strategic precision in an uncertain world. It is impossible to get everything right because of market volatility, but we can ensure strategies do not collide. In large, complex organizations where many executives are empowered to launch major change, strategic incoherence can be a big problem." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
"Along with the important information that executives need to be data literate, there is one other key role they play: executives drive data literacy learning and initiatives at the organization." (Jordan Morrow, "Be Data Literate: The data literacy skills everyone needs to succeed", 2021)
"Standardization enables delegation of authority, allowing the top management and executives to have time to think about future plans and policy, which is their most important duty." (Kaoru Ishikawa)
