"The whole object of the organization is to get cooperation, to get to each individual the benefit of all the knowledge and all the experience of all individuals." (Hamilton M Barksdale, 1909)
"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)
"The leadership and other processes of the organization must be such as to ensure a maximum probability that in all interactions and all interactions and all relationships with the organization each member will, in the light of his background, values, and expectations, view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his sense of personal worth and importance." (Rensis Likert, "New patterns of management", 1961)
"[There is a] persistent human temptation to make life more explicable by making it more calculable; to put experience in some logical scheme that, by its order and niceness, will make what happens seem more understandable, analysis more bearable, decision simpler." (E E Morison, Management and the Computer of the Future, 1962)
"[...] long-range plans are most valuable when they are revised and adjusted and set anew at shorter periods. The five-year plan is reconstructed each year in turn for the following five years. The soundest basis for this change is accurate measurement of the results of the first year's experience with the plan against the target of the plan." (George S Odiorne, "Management by Objectives", 1965)
"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)
"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images." (Kenneth E Boulding, [foreword] 1972)
"It makes little sense to subject all employees to training programs, to personnel policies, and to supervision designed for one group of employees, and in particular designed, as so many of the policies are, for yesterday's typical entrant into the labor force the fifteen or sixteen year old without any experience. More and more we will have to have personnel policies that fit the person rather than bureaucratic convenience or tradition." (Peter F Drucker, "Management in Turbulent Times", 1980)
"Managing upward relies on informal relationships, timing, exploiting ambiguity, and implicit communication. And the irony of it all is that these most subtle skills must be learned and mastered by younger managers who not only lack education and directed experience in benign guerilla warfare but are further misguided by management myths which contribute to false expectations and a misleading perception of reality." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)
"Most managers are reluctant to comment on ineffective or inappropriate interpersonal behavior. But these areas are often crucial for professional task success. This hesitancy is doubly felt when there is a poor relationship between the two. [...] Too few managers have any experience in how to confront others effectively; generally they can more easily give feedback on inadequate task performance than on issues dealing with another's personal style." (David L Bradford & Allan R Cohen, "Managing for Excellence", 1984)
"A holistic perspective is essential in management. If we base management decisions on any other perspective, we are likely to experience results different from those intended because only the whole is reality." (Allan Savory & Jody Butterfield, "Holistic Management: A new framework for decision making", 1988)
"Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of 'events' that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing. " (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)
"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)
"You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience [...] you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology." (Andy Grove, 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 most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. And the way we become leaders is by learning about leadership through life and job experiences, not with university degrees." (Warren Bennis, Managing People Is Like Herding Cats", 1999)
"Data have to be filtered in some manner to make them intelligible. This filtration may be based upon a person's experience plus his presuppositions and assumptions, or it may be more formalized and less subjective, but there will always be some method of analysis. If experience is the basis for interpreting the data, then the interpretation is only as good as the manager's past experience. If the current situation is outside the manager’s experience, then his interpretation of the data may well be incorrect. Likewise, flawed assumptions or flawed presuppositions can also result in flawed interpretations. However, in the absence of formal and standardized data, most managers use the scat-of-the-pants approach. and in the end, about all they can say that some days appear to be better than others." (Donald J Wheeler," Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos" 2nd Ed., 2000)
"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 whole way of thinking focuses attention, for most, on the designed system, but it never proves sufficient, and they [the managers] have to 'get things done anyway', almost despite the system. What they are not encouraged to do, by this very way of thinking itself, is to pay attention to the detailed interactions between them, through which they get things done. [This] is a thoroughly stressful daily experience for people." (Ralph D. Stacey et al, "Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?", 2000)
"Enterprise Architecture is the discipline whose purpose is to align more effectively the strategies of enterprises together with their processes and their resources (business and IT). Enterprise architecture is complex because it involves different types of practitioners with different goals and practices. Enterprise Architecture can be seen as an art; it is largely based on experience but does not have strong theoretical foundations. As a consequence, it is difficult to teach, to apply, and to support with computer-aided tools." (Alain Wegmann, "On the systemic enterprise architecture methodology", 2003)
"Acquired patterns and the logic to employ them combine with our inherent qualities to create a unique decision-maker. As time goes by, experience and knowledge are focused through the prism of talent, which can itself be sharpened, focused, and polished. This mix is the source of intuition, an absolutely unique tool that each of us possesses and that we can continuously hone into an ever-finer instrument." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)
"Decision trees are an important tool for decision making and risk analysis, and are usually represented in the form of a graph or list of rules. One of the most important features of decision trees is the ease of their application. Being visual in nature, they are readily comprehensible and applicable. Even if users are not familiar with the way that a decision tree is constructed, they can still successfully implement it. Most often decision trees are used to predict future scenarios, based on previous experience, and to support rational decision making." (Jelena Djuris et al, "Neural computing in pharmaceutical products and process development", Computer-Aided Applications in Pharmaceutical Technology, 2013)
"Our beliefs are based on our experience, which gives us a very incomplete picture of the world, and it's easy to jump to false conclusions." (Pedro Domingos, "The Master Algorithm", 2015)
"[…] deliver a customer experience where the customer sees real value from how you use the data that they share with you and they will keep interacting/sharing that data and their consent for you to use it!" (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)
"Data from the customer interactions is the lifeblood for any organization to view, understand and optimise the customer experience both remotely and on the front line! In the same way that customer experience experts understand that it’s the little things that count, it’s the small data that can make all the difference." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)
"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-optimizing its commercial position." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)
"Ideally, a decision maker or a forecaster will combine the outside view and the inside view - or, similarly, statistics plus personal experience. But it’s much better to start with the statistical view, the outside view, and then modify it in the light of personal experience than it is to go the other way around. If you start with the inside view you have no real frame of reference, no sense of scale - and can easily come up with a probability that is ten times too large, or ten times too small." (Tim Harford, "The Data Detective: Ten easy rules to make sense of statistics", 2020)
"There is a remarkable agreement upon the definition of learning as being reflected in a change of behavior as the result of experience." (Ernest A Haggard)4
No comments:
Post a Comment