"Failure to succeed greatly in management usually occurs not so much from lack of knowledge of the important principles of the science of management as from failure to apply them. Most of the principles of successful management are old, and many of them have received sufficient publicity to be well known, but managers are curiously prone to look upon managerial success as a personal attribute that is slightly dependent on principles or laws." (Allan C Haskell, "How to Make and Use Graphic Charts", 1919)
"Failure to delegate causes managers to be crushed and fail under the weight of accumulated duties that they do not know and have not learned to delegate." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)
"The making of decisions, as everyone knows from personal experience, is a burdensome task. Offsetting the exhilaration that may result from correct and successful decision and the relief that follows the termination of a struggle to determine issues is the depression that comes from failure, or error of decision, and the frustration which ensues from uncertainty." (Chester I Barnard, "The Functions of the Executive", 1938)
"You can teach the rudiments of cooking, as of management, but you cannot make a great cook or a great manager. In both activities, you ignore fundamentals at grave risk - but sometimes succeed. In both, science can be extremely useful but is no substitute for the art itself. In both, inspired amateurs can outdo professionals. In both, perfection is rarely achieved, and failure is more common than the customers realize. In both, practitioners don't need recipes that detail timing down to the last second, ingredients to the last fraction of an ounce, and procedures down to the Just flick of the wrist; they need reliable maxims, instructive anecdotes, and no dogmatism."
"We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)
"[...] when a variety of tasks have all to be performed in cooperation, synchronization, and communication, a business needs managers and a management. Otherwise, things go out of control; plans fail to turn into action; or, worse, different parts of the plans get going at different speeds, different times, and with different objectives and goals, and the favor of the 'boss' becomes more important than performance." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)
"A competent manager can usually explain necessary planning changes in terms of specific facts which have contributed to the change. The existing fear, or attitude of failure, which results from missed completion dates should be replaced by a more constructive fear of failing to keep a plan updated." (Philip F Gehring Jr. & Udo W Pooch, "Advances in Computer Programming Management", 1980)
"All problems present themselves to the mind as threats of failure." (J. J. Gordon, "Creative Computing", 1983)
"Most of us managers are prone to one failing: A tendency to manage people as though they were modular components." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Setting goals can be the difference between success and failure. [...] Goals must not be defined so broadly that they cannot be quantified. Having quantifiable goals is an essential starting point if managers are to measure the results of their organization's activities. [...] Too often people mistake being busy for achieving goals." (Philip D Harvey & James D Snyder, Harvard Business Review, 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)
"The major fault in this process - and thus, in the way we were making decisions - is that it lacks an organizing framework. In pursuing a variety of goals and objectives, in whatever situation we manage, we often fail to see that some of them are in conflict and that the achievement of one might come at the expense of achieving another. In weighing up the actions we might take to reach our goals and objectives, we have no way to account for nature's complexity and only rarely factor it in." (Allan Savory & Jody Butterfield, "Holistic Management: A new framework for decision making", 1988)
"Failing organizations are usually overmanaged and under-led." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)
"Commonly, the threats to strategy are seen to emanate from outside a company because of changes in technology or the behavior of competitors. Although external changes can be the problem, the greater threat to strategy often comes from within. A sound strategy is undermined by a misguided view of competition, by organizational failures, and, especially, by the desire to grow." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)
"Managers must clearly distinguish operational effectiveness from strategy. Both are essential, but the two agendas are different. The operational agenda involves continual improvement everywhere there are no trade-offs. Failure to do this creates vulnerability even for companies with a good strategy. The operational agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice. In contrast, the strategic agenda is the right place for defining a unique position, making clear trade-offs, and tightening fit. It involves the continual search for ways to reinforce and extend the company’s position. The strategic agenda demands discipline and continuity; its enemies are distraction and compromise." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)
"Managers are incurably susceptible to panacea peddlers. They are rooted in the belief that there are simple, if not simple-minded, solutions to even the most complex of problems. And they do not learn from bad experiences. Managers fail to diagnose the failures of the fads they adopt; they do not understand them. […] Those at the top feel obliged to pretend to omniscience, and therefore refuse to learn anything new even if the cost of doing so is success." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Lifetime Of Systems Thinking", Systems Thinker, 1999)
"The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort." (W Edwards Deming, "Out of the Crisis", 2000)
"Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"When unmeetable expectations are formed, failure is virtually assured, since we have defined failure as unmet expectations. This is called a planning failure and is the difference between what was planned to be accomplished and what was, in fact, achievable. The second component of failure is poor performance or actual failure. This is the difference between what was achievable and what was actually accomplished." (Harold Kerzner, "Strategic Planning for Project Management using a Project Management Maturity Model", 2001)
"When we fail to grasp the systemic source of problems, we are left to treat symptoms rather than eliminate underlying causes. Without systemic thinking, the best we can ever do is adapt or react. Systems thinking, powered by visual models, stimulates creative - rather than adaptive - behavior. [...] To benefit from systems thinking, the project team needs to extend that viewpoint upward to the bigger picture of the project’s overall environment."(Kevin Forsberg et al, "Visualizing Project Management: Models and frameworks for mastering complex systems" 3rd Ed., 2005)
"It’s tempting to view the multitude of monster projects gone bad as anomalies, excrescences of corporate and government bureaucracies run amok. But you will find similar tales of woe emerging from software projects big and small, public and private, old and new. Though details differ, the pattern is depressingly repetitive: Moving targets. Fluctuating goals. Unrealistic schedules. Missed deadlines. Ballooning costs. Despair. Chaos." (Scott Rosenberg, "Dreaming in Code", 2007)
"A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business." (Bill Gates, "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009)
"Any strategy that involves crossing a valley - accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance - will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done." (Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, 2011)
"Experts in the 'Problem' area proceed to elaborate its complexity. They design complex Systems to attack it. This approach guarantees failure, at least for all but the most pedestrian tasks. The problem is a Problem precisely because it is incorrectly conceptualized in the first place, and a large System for studying and attacking the Problem merely locks in the erroneous conceptualization into the minds of everyone concerned. What is required is not a large System, but a different approach. Trying to design a System in the hope that the System will somehow solve the Problem, rather than simply solving the Problem in the first place, is to present oneself with two problems in place of one." (John Gall, "The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small"[Systematics 3rd Ed.], 2011)
"Pragmatically, it is generally easier to aim at changing one or a few things at a time and then work out the unexpected effects, than to go to the opposite extreme. Attempting to correct everything in one grand design is appropriately designated as Grandiosity. […] A little Grandiosity goes a long way. […] The diagnosis of Grandiosity is quite elegantly and strictly made on a purely quantitative basis: How many features of the present System, and at what level, are to be corrected at once? If more than three, the plan is grandiose and will fail." (John Gall, "The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small"[Systematics 3rd Ed.], 2011)
"Restructuring is a favorite tactic of antisocials who have reached a senior position in an organization. The chaos that results is an ideal smokescreen for dysfunctional leadership. Failure at the top goes unnoticed, while the process of restructuring creates the illusion of a strong, creative hand on the helm." (Manfred F R Kets de Vries, "The Leader on the Couch", 2011)
"Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best." (Peter Senge, "The Dance of Change: The challenges to sustaining momentum in a learning organization", 2014)
"A strategy that doesn't take into account resources is doomed to failure." (John C Maxwell, "JumpStart Your Thinking: A 90-Day Improvement Plan", 2015)
"Culture is an emergent phenomenon produced by structures, practices, leadership behavior, incentives, symbols, rituals, and processes. All those levers have to be pulled to have any chance of success. However, one driver of culture change is more important than the others. Culture change fails when the most visible symbols of it fail to change. Those key symbols are almost always the top leader’s behavior, which speaks much louder than anything they might say." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
"[…] the practice of continuous integration helps a development team fail-fast in integrating code under development. A corollary of failing fast is to aim for fast feedback. The practice of regularly showcasing (demoing) features under development to product owners and business stakeholders helps them verify whether it is what they asked for and decide whether it is what they really want." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Evidence is freely available which demonstrates a gap between what the company thinks is important to customers and what customers actually deem to be the most important when it comes to making their choices. The failure to understand what is really important leads to customers receiving a sub-optimal experience and the company sub-optimising its commercial position." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)
"Organizations that rely too heavily on org charts and matrixes to split and control work often fail to create the necessary conditions to embrace innovation while still delivering at a fast pace. In order to succeed at that, organizations need stable teams and effective team patterns and interactions. They need to invest in empowered, skilled teams as the foundation for agility and adaptability. To stay alive in ever more competitive markets, organizations need teams and people who are able to sense when context changes and evolve accordingly."
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