"Weak character coupled with honored place, meager knowledge with large plans, limited powers with heavy responsibility, will seldom escape disaster." ("I Ching" ["Book of Changes"], cca. 600 BC)
"The only way for a large organization to function is to decentralize, to delegate real authority and responsibility to the man on the job. But be certain you have the right man on the job." (Robert E Wood, 1951)
"[...] authority - the right by which superiors are able to require conformity of subordinates to decisions - is the basis for responsibility and the force that binds organization together. The process of organizing encompasses grouping of activities for purposes of management and specification of authority relationships between superiors and subordinates and horizontally between managers. Consequently, authority and responsibility relationships come into being in all associative undertakings where the superior-subordinate link exists. It is these relationships that create the basic character of the managerial job." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"[...] authority for given tasks is limited to that for which an individual may properly held responsible." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"If charts do not reflect actual organization and if the organization is intended to be as charted, it is the job of effective management to see that actual organization conforms with that desired. Organization charts cannot supplant good organizing, nor can a chart take the place of spelling out authority relationships clearly and completely, of outlining duties of managers and their subordinates, and of defining responsibilities." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"Responsibility cannot be delegated. While a manager may delegate to a subordinate authority to accomplish a service and the subordinate in turn delegate a portion of the authority received, none of these superiors delegates any of his responsibility. Responsibility, being an obligation to perform, is owed to one's superior, and no subordinate reduces his responsibility by assigning the duty to another. Authority may be delegated, but responsibility is created by the subordinate's acceptance of his assignment." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"Viewed internally with respect to the enterprise, responsibility may be defined as the obligation of a subordinate, to whom a superior has assigned a duty, to perform the service required. The essence of responsibility is, then, obligation. It has no meaning except as it is applied to a person." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"You can delegate authority, but you can never delegate responsibility by delegating a task to someone else. If you picked the right man, fine, but if you picked the wrong man, the responsibility is yours - not his." (Richard E Krafve, The Boston Sunday Globe, 1960)
"Modern organization makes demands on the individual to learn something he has never been able to do before: to use organization intelligently, purposefully, deliberately, responsibly [...] to manage organization [...] to make [...] his job in it serve his ends, his values, his desire to achieve." (Peter F Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity, 1968)
"[Management by objectives is] a process whereby the superior and the subordinate managers of an enterprise jointly identify its common goals, define each individual's major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members." (Robert House, "Administrative Science Quarterly", 1971)
"'Management' means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for authority of rank. (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)
"[...] the first criterion in identifying those people within an organization who have management responsibility is not command over people. It is responsibility for contribution. Function rather than power has to be the distinctive criterion and the organizing principle." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)
"The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager." (Peter F Drucker, "Management in Turbulent Times", 1980)
"By assuming sole responsibility for their departments, managers produce the very narrowness and self-interest they deplore in subordinates. When subordinates are relegated to their narrow specialties, they tend to promote their own practical interests, which then forces other subordinates into counter-advocacy. The manager is thereby thrust into the roles of arbitrator, judge, and referee. Not only do priorities become distorted, but decisions become loaded with win/lose dynamics. So, try as the manager might, decisions inevitably lead to disgruntlement and plotting for the next battle." (David L Bradford & Allan R Cohen, "Managing for Excellence", 1984)
"The man who delegates responsibilities for running the company, without knowing the intimate details of what is involved, runs the enormous risk of rendering himself superfluous." (Harold Geneen, "Managing", 1984)
"Leadership is the total effect you have on the people and events around you. This effect is your influence. Effective leading is being consciously responsible for your organizational influence. [...] The essence of leadership is knowing that YOU CAN NEVER NOT LEAD. You lead by acts of commission and acts of omission." (Kenneth Schatz & Linda Schatz, "Managing by Influence", 1986)
"Looking for differences between the more productive and less productive organizations, we found that the most striking difference is the number of people who are involved and feel responsibility for solving problems." (Michael McTague, "Personnel Journal", 1986)
"Management has a responsibility to explain to the employee how the routine job contributes to the business's objectives. If management cannot explain the value of the job, then it should be eliminated and the employee reassigned." (Douglas M Reid, Harvard Business Review, 1986)
"A systematic effort must be made to emphasize the group instead of the individual. [...] Group goals and responsibilities can usually overcome any negative reactions to the individual and enforce a standard of cooperation that is attainable by persuasion or exhortation." (Eugene Raudsepp, MTS Digest, 1987)
"An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility." (Jan Carlzon, "Moments of Truth", 1987)
"Executives have to start understanding that they have certain legal and ethical responsibilities for information under their control." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)
"If responsibility - and particularly accountability - is most obviously upwards, moral responsibility also reaches downwards. The commander has a responsibility to those whom he commands. To forget this is to vitiate personal integrity and the ethical validity of the system." (Roger L Shinn, "Military Ethics", 1987)
[...] quality assurance is the job of the managers responsible for the product. A separate group can't 'assure' much if the responsible managers have not done their jobs properly. [...] Managers should be held responsible for quality and not allowed to slough off part of their responsibility to a group whose name sounds right but which cannot be guaranteed quality if the responsible managers have not been able to do so." (Philip W. Metzger, "Managing Programming People", 1987)
"Responsibility is a unique concept [...] You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. [...] If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible." (Hyman G Rickover, "The Rickover Effect", 1992)
"If you treat people as though they are responsible, they tend to behave that way." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)
"You can’t delegate responsibility without giving a person authority commensurate with it." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)
"What do people do today when they don’t understand 'the system'? They try to assign responsibility to someone to fix the problem, to oversee 'the system', to coordinate and control what is happening. It is time we recognized that 'the system' is how we work together. When we don’t work together effectively putting someone in charge by its very nature often makes things worse, rather than better, because no one person can understand 'the system' well enough to be responsible. We need to learn how to improve the way we work together, to improve 'the system' without putting someone in charge, in order to make things work." (Yaneer Bar-Yam, "Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World", 2004)
"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)
"Any software project must have a technical leader, who is responsible for all technical decisions made by the team and have enough authority to make them. Responsibility and authority are two mandatory components that must be present in order to make it possible to call such a person an architect." (Yegor Bugayenko, "Code Ahead", 2018)
"Responsibility means an inevitable punishment for mistakes; authority means full power to make them." (Yegor Bugayenko, "Code Ahead", 2018)
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