06 December 2016

Strategic Management: Information (Just the Quotes)

"Information, that is imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained." (William Playfair, "The Commercial and Political Atlas", 1786)

"A man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him no news, or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy, or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process and make him somewhat less than a man." (Arthur H Sulzberger, [speech] 1948)

"Every person seems to have a limited capacity to assimilate information, and if it is presented to him too rapidly and without adequate repetition, this capacity will be exceeded and communication will break down." (R Duncan Luce, "Developments in Mathematical Psychology", 1960)

"In most management problems there are too many possibilities to expect experience, judgement, or intuition to provide good guesses, even with perfect information." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)

"Most MIS [Management Information Systems] designers 'determine' what information is needed by asking managers what information they would like to have. This is based on the (often erroneous) assumption that managers know that information they need and want it." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)

"The lack of needed information, and of adequately informed judgments on it, often betrays intelligent and sincere public leaders into making reckless and inconsistent promises to the public. Much of the 'credibility gap' arises from this failure of governmental processes to produce needed current facts and information." (Luther H Gulick, "Program Planning for National Goals", 1968)

"It is more important for the manager to get his information quickly and efficiently than to get it formally." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work", 1973)

"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"Information may be accumulated in files, but it must be retrieved to be of use in decision making." (Kenneth J Arrow, "The Limits of Organization", 1974)

"Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload." (Richard S Wurman, "What-If, Could-Be", 1976)

"We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows." (Warren G Bennis, "Why leaders can't lead: the unconscious conspiracy continues", 1976)

"When information is centralized and controlled, those who have it are extremely influential. Since information is [usually] localized in control subsystems, these subsystems have a great deal of organization influence." (Henry L Tosi & Stephen J Carroll, "Management", 1976)

"The greater the uncertainty, the greater the amount of decision making and information processing. It is hypothesized that organizations have limited capacities to process information and adopt different organizing modes to deal with task uncertainty. Therefore, variations in organizing modes are actually variations in the capacity of organizations to process information and make decisions about events which cannot be anticipated in advance." (John K Galbraith, "Organization Design", 1977)

"The information we have is not what we want. The information we want is not what we need. The information we need is not available." (John Peers, "1,001 Logical Laws", 1979)

"Managers often try to give others the feeling that they are participating in the decision process. When a manager involves people in a problem for which he has adequate information and clear criteria for making an acceptable decision, he is engaging in pseudoconsultation. When he involves others in lengthy discussions of trivial problems, he is engaging in pseudoparticipation. Most people recognize these ceremonies as a waste of time." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)

"Given a multilevel organization having component groups which perform a variety of functions in order to accomplish a unified objective, an MIS [Management Information System] is an integrated structure of data bases and information flow over all levels and components, whereby information collection and transfer is optimized to meet the needs of the organization." (Larry E Long, "Manager's Guide to Computers and Information Systems", 1983)

"Individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as middle managers, because they exert great power within the organization." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Information gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which is why I choose to spend so much of my day doing it." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"There is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers. That is to visit a particular place in the company and observe what's going on there." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"No talent in management is worth more than the ability to master facts - not just any facts, but the ones that provide the best answers. Mastery thus involves knowing what facts you want; where to dig for them; how to dig; how to process the mined ore; and how to use the precious nuggets of information that are finally in your hand. The process can be laborious - which is why it is so often botched." (Robert Heller, "The Supermanagers", 1984)

"Try as far as possible to pass on information rather than your conclusions. Your conclusions, if they are right, are part of your competitive advantage. If they are wrong and you pass them on they may come back to haunt you." (Mary A Allison & Eric Allison, "Managing Up, Managing Down", 1984)

"A real challenge for some organizations is to build more qualitative information into their formal systems. One method used in some companies is to request a written narrative with each submission of statistics from the field. Another method is to hold periodic, indepth discussions involving several managers from different levels so that each can contribute whatever qualitative data are available to him." (Larry E Greiner et al, "Human Relations", 1986)

"People will make reasonable decisions if they are given proper information." (Thom Serrani, Management Review, 1986)

"An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility." (Jan Carlzon, "Moments of Truth", 1987)

"[...] as the planning process proceeds to a specific financial or marketing state, it is usually discovered that a considerable body of 'numbers' is missing, but needed numbers for which there has been no regular system of collection and reporting; numbers that must be collected outside the firm in some cases. This serendipity usually pays off in a much better management information system in the form of reports which will be collected and reviewed routinely." (William H. Franklin Jr., Financial Strategies, 1987)

"Executives have to start understanding that they have certain legal and ethical responsibilities for information under their control." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)

"Practically all large corporations insure their data bases against loss or damage or against their inability to gain access to them. Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, 'Information'; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it." (Grace M Hopper [speech] 1987)

"The tendency to hide unfavorable information often occurs in companies that are quick to reward success and equally quick to punish failure." (Robert M Tomasko, "Downsizing", 1987)

"There are only two ways to get people to support corporate change. You should give employees the information they need to understand the reasons for change, and put enough influence behind the information to [gain their] support." (Carla O'Dell, 1987)

"There is a profound difference between information and meaning." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"Organizations need the capacity for double-loop learning. Double-loop learning occurs when managers question their underlying assumptions and reflect on whether the theory under which they were operating remains consistent with current evidence, observations, and experience. Of course, managers need feedback about whether their planned strategy is being executed according to plan-the single-loop learning process. But even more important, they need feedback about whether the planned strategy remains a viable and successful strategy-the double-loop learning process. Managers need information so that they can question whether the fundamental assumptions made when they launched the strategy are valid." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Information needs representation. The idea that it is possible to communicate information in a 'pure' form is fiction. Successful risk communication requires intuitively clear representations. Playing with representations can help us not only to understand numbers (describe phenomena) but also to draw conclusions from numbers (make inferences). There is no single best representation, because what is needed always depends on the minds that are doing the communicating." (Gerd Gigerenzer, "Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you", 2002)

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