"The essence of managership is the achievement of coordination among people. Coordination is a complex concept, including principles by which harmonious enterprise activity can be accomplished and the many techniques for achieving the greatest synchronized effort." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)
"Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme." (Herbert A. Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1957)
"There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable." (Peter F Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", 1973)
"We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Structuring of Organizations", 1979)
"Knowledge specialists may ascribe a degree of certainty to their models of the world that baffles and offends managers. Often the complexity of the world cannot be reduced to mathematical abstractions that make sense to a manager. Managers who expect complete, one-to-one correspondence between the real world and each element in a model are disappointed and skeptical." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)
"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." (Laurence J Peter, Peter's Almanac, 1982)
"Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)
"Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives." (George B Dantzig, "Mathematical Programming: The state of the art", 1983)
"Organizations are complex and paradoxical phenomena that can be understood in many different ways. Many of our taken-for-granted ideas about organizations are metaphorical, even though we may not recognize them as such. For example, we frequently talk about organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve predetermined goals and objectives, and which should operate smoothly and efficiently. And as a result of this kind of thinking, we often attempt to organize and manage them in a mechanistic way, forcing their human qualities into a background role. By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought possible before." (Gareth Morgan, "Images of Organization", 1986)
"Decisions should be pushed down as far as possible, to the level of competence. This allows senior managers more time for making decisions of a more complex nature." (Robert Heller, "The Pocket Manager", 1987)
"In complex situations, we may rely too heavily on planning and forecasting and underestimate the importance of random factors in the environment. That reliance can also lead to delusions of control." (Hillel J Einhorn & Robin M. Hogarth, Harvard Business Review, 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)
"Most managers are not capable of making decisions involving complex technological matters without helplots of it. [...] The finest technical people on the job should have dual role: doing technical work and advising management." (Philip W Metzger & John Boddie, "Managing a Programming Project: People and Processes", 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)
"Faced with the overwhelming complexity of the real world, time pressure, and limited cognitive capabilities, we are forced to fall back on rote procedures, habits, rules of thumb, and simple mental models to make decisions. Though we sometimes strive to make the best decisions we can, bounded rationality means we often systematically fall short, limiting our ability to learn from experience." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"The most basic issue for organizational success is correctly matching a system’s complexity to its environment. When we want to accomplish a task, the complexity of the system performing that task must match the complexity of the task. In order to perform the matching correctly, one must recognize that each person has a limited level of complexity. Therefore, tasks become difficult because the complexity of a person is not large enough to handle the complexity of the task. The trick then is to distribute the complexity of the task among many individuals." (Yaneer Bar-Yam, "Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World", 2004)
"Organizations are not systems but the ongoing patterning of interactions between people. Patterns of human interaction produce further patterns of interaction, not some thing outside of the interaction. We call this perspective complex responsive processes of relating." (Ralph Stacey, 2005)
"Today’s big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organization structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient." (Lowell L Bryan & Claudia Joyce, "The 21st century organization", 2005)
"One way of managing complexity is to constrain the freedom of the parts: to hold some of those nonlinear interactions still. Businesses accomplish this with tight rules, processes, hierarchies, policies, and rigid strategies. Gathering people together under a corporate roof reduces complexity by constraining individual autonomy. The upside, of course, is collaboration, alignment of goals, and faster exchange of information." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
"The passage of time and the action of entropy bring about ever-greater complexity - a branching, blossoming tree of possibilities. Blossoming disorder (things getting worse), now unfolding within the constraints of the physics of our universe, creates novel opportunities for spontaneous ordered complexity to arise." (D J MacLennan, "Frozen to Life", 2015)
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