"The concept of leadership has an ambiguous status in organizational practice, as it does in organizational theory. In practice, management appears to be of two minds about the exercise of leadership. Many jobs are so specified in content and method that within very broad limits differences among individuals become irrelevant, and acts of leadership are regarded as gratuitous at best, and at worst insubordinate." (Daniel Katz & Robert L Kahn, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)
"Planning and management by objectives have their point as devices for compelling thought, so long as executives don't forget that any plan worth making is inaccurate; the longer a plan takes to write, the worse it is - just because of its consumption of time. And the more they change plans to suit events, the better they will manage - if you've made a mistake, you had better admit it." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"[...] 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)
"The first rule is that a measurement - any measurement - is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. […] If you do not systematically collect and maintain an archive of indicators, you will have to do an awful lot of quick research to get the information you need, and by the time you have it, the problem is likely to have gotten worse." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)
"The obsession with methodologies in the workplace is another instance of the high-tech illusion. It stems from the belief that what really matters is the technology. [...] Whatever the technological advantage may be, it may come only at the price of a significant worsening of the team's sociology." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Managers sometimes justify the stick by pointing to better results, with the assumption that the threats caused the improvements. Alas, this is unlikely. One event coming before another does not automatically mean that the first is the cause of the second; the rooster does not make the sun rise every morning, although it may think it does. Bad results are much more likely to improve than get worse due to the simple law of statistics known as regression: results average out over time. Poor performance will eventually improve even when left to itself." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)
"A blame culture is corrosive, eroding the team ethos that is vital for success. If they fear that they will be pilloried or punished for their mistakes, your colleagues will start worrying more about how to protect their back than doing what’s best for the team and wider organization. In the worst cases, this can even lead to lying, setting up fall guys, and other dysfunctional behavior." (Paul Butcher, "Debug It! Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code", 2009)
"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while strategy is undoubtedly a good thing to have, it is a hard thing to get right. […] So what turns something that is not quite strategy into strategy is a sense of actual or imminent instability, a changing context that induces a sense of conflict. Strategy therefore starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different." (Lawrence Freedman, “Strategy: A history”, 2013)
"Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others." (Nigel Cumberland, "Secrets of Success at Work: 50 techniques to excel", 2014)
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