"The art of management has been defined, 'As knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way.' No concise definition can fully describe an art, but the relations between employers and men form without question the most important part of this art. In considering the subject, therefore, until this part of the problem has been fully discussed, the remainder of the art may be left in the background." (Frederick W Taylor, "Shop Management", 1903)
"The writer has found, in analyzing and diagnosing organization and accounting work, that charts can express more on one page than is sometimes expressed in several chapters of writing, and has been the author and originator of many methods of charting industrial expressions. It is necessary, as a first step, for analytical and other purposes, to make a chart expressing all of the relations governing the organization of a business so as to show the very foundation upon which all authorities, accounting, and business transactions are based and conducted. There have been more failures scored both personally and financially for lack of these very elements in a business than by reason of any other one thing. As well try to build a house without a foundation as to try to conduct a business, especially a manufacturing business, without proper organization." (Clinton E Woods, "Organizing a factory", 1905)
"The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism." (Philip Selznick, "Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation", 1957)
"The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization." (Paul Hersey & Kenneth H Blanchard, "Management of Organizational Behavior", 1972)
"The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system [...] simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems." (Jerry Fodor, "Modularity of Mind", 1983)
"The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: (1) the choice of an objective function denning the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decisionmaker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function." (Kenneth Arrow, "The Economics of Information", 1984)
"Culture [is] a pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)
"Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense." (Karl E Weick, "Organizational culture as a source of high reliability", 1987)
"Formulation of a mathematical model is the first step in the process of analyzing the behaviour of any real system. However, to produce a useful model, one must first adopt a set of simplifying assumptions which have to be relevant in relation to the physical features of the system to be modelled and to the specific information one is interested in. Thus, the aim of modelling is to produce an idealized description of reality, which is both expressible in a tractable mathematical form and sufficiently close to reality as far as the physical mechanisms of interest are concerned." (Francois Axisa, "Discrete Systems" Vol. I, 2001)
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