♟️Strategic Management: Coordination (Just the Quotes)

"To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control. To foresee and plan means examining the future and drawing up the plan of action. To organize means building up the dual structure, material and human, of the undertaking. To command means binding together, unifying and harmonizing all activity and effort. To control means seeing that everything occurs in conformity with established rule and expressed demand." (Henri Fayol, 1916)

"Leadership is the form that authority assumes when it enters into process. As such it constitutes the determining principle of the entire scalar process, existing not only at the source, but projecting itself through its own action throughout the entire chain, until, through functional definition, it effectuates the formal coordination of the entire structure." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"Coordination, therefore, is the orderly arrangement of group efforts, to provide unity of action in the pursuit of a common purpose. As coordination is the all inclusive principle of organization it must have its own principle and foundation in authority, or the supreme coordination power. Always, in every form of organization, this supreme authority must rest somewhere, else there would be no directive for any coordinated effort." (James D Mooney, "The Principles of Organization", 1947)

"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)

"Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Structuring of Organizations", 1979)

"Enterprise architecture is a holistic representation of all the components of the enterprise and the use of graphics and schemes are used to emphasize all parts of the enterprise, and how they are interrelated. [...] Enterprise architectures are used to deal with intra-organizational processes, interorganizational cooperation and coordination, and their shared use of information and information technologies. Business developments, such as outsourcing, partnership, alliances and Electronic Data Interchange, extend the need for architecture across company boundaries." (Gordon B Davis," The Blackwell encyclopedic dictionary of management information systems"‎, 1999)

"We plan because: We need to ensure that we are always working on the most important thing we need to do. We need to coordinate with other people. When unexpected events occur we need to understand the consequences for the first two." (Kent Beck & Martin Fowler, "Planning Extreme Programming", 2000)

"Organizations are (1) social entities that (2) are goal-directed, (3) are designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (4) are linked to the external environment." (Richard Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2002)

"A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, 'vision', planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

♟️Strategic Management: Ethics (Just the Quotes)

"Neither by nature nor contrary to nature do the moral excellences arise in us, rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and made perfect by habit." (Aristotle, "Nochomachean Ethics", cca. 340 BC)

"A low morality will not sustain leadership long, its influence quickly vanishes, it cannot produce its own succession." (Chester I Barnard, "The Functions of the Executive", 1938)

"One of the more disturbing aspects of this problem of moral conduct is the revelation that among so many influential people morality has become identified with legality. We are certainly in a tragic plight if the accepted standard by which we measure the integrity of a man in public life is that he keeps within the law." (Williarn Fulbright, [speech] 1967)

"The task of building an ethical environment where leaders and all personnel are instructed, encouraged, and rewarded for ethical behavior is a matter of first importance. All decisions, practices, goals, and values of the entire institutional structure which make ethical behavior difficult should be examined, beginning with the following: First, blatant or subtle forms of ethical relativism which blur the issue of what is right or wrong or which bury it as a subject of little or no importance. Second, the exaggerated loyalty syndrome, where people are afraid to tell the truth and are discouraged from it. Third, the obsession with image, where people are not even interested in the truth. And last, the drive for success, in which ethical sensitivity is bought off or sold because of the personal need to achieve." (Kermit D Johnson, "Ethical Issues of Military Leadership", 1974)

"Organizations tend to grow through stages, face and surmount crises, and along the way learn lessons and draw morals that shape values and future actions. Usually these developments influence assumptions and the way people behave. Often key episodes are recounted in 'war stories' that convey lessons about the firm's origins and transformations in dramatic form. Eventually, this lore provides a consistent background for action. New members are exposed to the common history and acquire insight into some of the subtle aspects of their company." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)

"If managers are careless about basic things telling the truth, respecting moral codes, proper professional conduct - who can believe them on other issues?" (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)

"The key mission of contemporary management is to transcend the old models which limited the manager's role to that of controller, expert or morale booster. These roles do not produce the desired result of aligning the goals of the employees and the corporation. [...] These older models, vestiges of a bygone era, have served their function and must be replaced with a model of the manager as a developer of human resources." (Michael Durst, "Small Systems World", 1985)

"Ethical pressures and decisions are viewed through the prism of one's own personal values. The distinction between personal and organizational values, however, often becomes blurred, especially the longer one stays with a particular organization and/or advances up the hierarchical ladder." (Warren H Schmidt & Barry Z Posner, Public Administration Review, 1986)

"The practice of declaring codes of ethics and teaching them to managers is not enough to deter unethical conduct." (Saul W Gellerman, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"Despite the codes of ethics, the ethics programs, and the special departments corporations don't make the ultimate decisions about ethics. Ethical choices are made by individuals." (M Euel Wade Jr., [speech] 1987)

"Executives have to start understanding that they have certain legal and ethical responsibilities for information under their control." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)

"The art of ethical management lies in unmixing the 'grey' areas to achieve clarity in resolution of ethical dilemmas." (Sheldon S Steinberg, "Workshop on Ethical Practices", 1987)

"Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example." (Edward L Hennessy Jr., The New York Times, 1988)

"As in the past, our service must rest upon a solid ethical base, because those who discharge such moral responsibilities must uphold and abide by the highest standards of behavior." (John A Wickham)

"Ethical and legal aren't the same. One can be dishonest, unprincipled, untrustworthy, unfair, and uncaring, without breaking the law." (Michael Josephson)

"For ethically committed persons, laws simply establish baseline standards of impropriety. Ultimately, these persons seek to do what is right in terms of universal moral principles such as honesty, integrity, loyalty, fairness, caring and respect for others, accountability and protection of the public trust. Laws cannot coerce these values." (Michael Josephson)

"On a practical level, there are two vital steps to ethical behavior: knowing what is right and doing it." (Michael Josephson)

♟️Strategic Management: Culture (Just the Quotes)

"Culture itself is neither education nor lawmaking: it is an atmosphere and a heritage." (Henry L Mencken, "Minority Report", 1956)

"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media works as environments." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others." (Geert Hofstede, "Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values", 1980)

"Someone adhering to the values of a corporate culture - an intelligent corporate citizen - will behave in consistent fashion under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer the inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations. […] management has to develop and nurture the common set of values, objectives, and methods essential to the existence of trust. How do we do that? One way is by articulation, by spelling [them] out. […] The other even more important way is by example." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Strong corporate cultures, like strong family cultures, come from within, and they are built by individual leaders, not consultants." (Craig R. Hickman & Michael A. Silva, "Creating Excellence", 1984)

"The achievement of excellence can occur only if the organization promotes a culture of creative dissatisfaction." (Lawrence M Miller, "American Spirit", 1984)

"[...] an examination of cultural issues at the organizational level is absolutely essential to a basic understanding of what goes on in organizations, how to run them, and how to improve them." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)

"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)

"Organizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and - if and when that may become necessary - the destruction of culture." (Edgar Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)

"The inherent conflict between managers and professionals results basically from a clash of cultures: the corporate culture, which captures the commitment of managers, and the professional culture, which socializes professionals." (Joseph A Raelin, Harvard Business School, 1986)

"A strong corporate culture is the invisible hand that guides how things are done in an organization. The phrase, 'You just can't do that here', is extremely powerful, more so than any written rules or policy manuals." (Andrew S Grove, "One-On-One With Andy Grove", 1987)

"A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least." (Jacques Barzun, "The Culture We Deserve", 1989)

"Even revolutionaries conserve; all cultures are conservative. This is so because it is a systemic phenomenon: all systems exist only as long as there is conservation of that which defines them." (Humberto M Romesin & Pille Bunnell, "Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: What has that to do with Business? Society for Organizational Learning", 1998)

"Strategy maps show the cause-and effect links by which specific improvements create desired outcomes [...] From a larger perspective, strategy maps show how an organization will convert its initiatives and resources - including intangible assets such as corporate culture and employee knowledge - into tangible outcomes." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)

"Getting project management to work in an organization requires a change in culture." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"The word culture designates the sum total of the values, attitudes, traditions, and behaviors that exist in an organization." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe." (Steve Jobs, Newsweek, 2004)

"Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness [...] the three-way coevolution of physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs…accounts for the patterns of change and growth we see in the economy." (Eric D Beinhocker, "The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics", 2006)

"Whilst culture can help create a sense of belonging and shared destiny, it can also prove to be an obstacle to change especially where the existing culture is risk averse or if the change strategy is perceived by some to challenge prevailing group values. Where radical change is proposed, the achievement of cultural change may actually be a major objective of the proposed change." (Roger Jones & Neil Murra, "Change, Strategy and Projects at Work", 2008)

"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)

"A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009) 

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012) 

"The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people." (John Kotter, "The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations", 2012)

"Culture is fuzzy, easy to caricature, amenable to oversimplifications, and often used as a catchall when all other explanations fail." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

"Truly human leadership protects an organization from the internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result." (Simon Sinek, "Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't", 2014)

"All cultures organize themselves around a story, which tells them how the world came into being - a creation myth." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"[…] culture cannot be changed directly. It changes as a result of changes to organizational beliefs and rituals." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 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)

"DevOps recognizes the importance of culture. The acronym CAMS (culture, automation, measurement, and sharing) is used to encapsulate its key themes. Culture is acknowledged as all important in making development and IT operations work together effectively. But what is culture in this context? It is not so much about an informal dress code, flexible hours, or a free in-house cafeteria as it is about how decisions are taken, norms of behavior, protocols of communication, and the ways of navigating hierarchy and bureaucracy to get things done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"In order to cultivate a culture of accountability, first it is essential to assign it clearly. People ought to clearly know what they are accountable for before they can be held to it. This goes beyond assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs). To be accountable for an outcome, we need authority for making decisions, not just responsibility for execution. It is tempting to refrain from the tricky exercise of explicitly assigning accountability. Executives often hope that their reports will figure it out. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Each organization has embedded in its corporate culture and in its rules and processes, its own understanding of business value and how to best create it." (Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value, 2016)

"The biggest challenge of making the evolution from a knowing culture to a learning culture [...] is really not the cost. Initially, it largely ends up being imagination and inertia." (Murli Buluswar, "How Companies Are Using Big Data and Analytics", 2016)

"The culture of your organization comprises your stated principles, and to a far greater extent, the actual lived principles as reflected by the attitudes, communication styles, and behaviors of your teams." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"Knowledge is in some ways the most important (though intangible) capital of a software engineering organization, and sharing of that knowledge is crucial for making an organization resilient and redundant in the face of change. A culture that promotes open and honest knowledge sharing distributes that knowledge efficiently across the organization and allows that organization to scale over time. In most cases, investments into easier knowledge sharing reap manyfold dividends over the life of a company." (Titus Winters, "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time", 2020)

"Culture is not something that can be read in a corporate document (though many organisations will claim to have values, beliefs and other concepts that articulate the culture as the corporate centre wants it to be seen). It is intangible and can be challenging to comprehend to those on the outside looking in. Much of it is unspoken, a series of behavioural norms which are engrained in the fabric of the organisation and drive attitudes of employees to one another, management, change programmes and any external (to the group, as well as the organisation) effort to drive change that may be resisted simply because it ‘isn’t the way we do things around here’." (Ian Wallis, "Data Strategy: From definition to execution", 2021)

"A literate culture relies on the reader to personalize the information and the author to provide enough information and clarity to do so. It's a different thought process, one that rewards unique phrasings and the ability to create clearly resonant themes in advance. We bring these models to other literacy paradigms." (Vidya Setlur & Bridget Cogley, "Functional Aesthetics for data visualization", 2022)

"We can expect the revolution in communications to extend the power of our brains. Its ultimate effect will be the transformation and unification of all techniques for the exchange of ideas and information, of culture and learning. It will not only generate new knowledge, but will supply the means for its world-wide dissemination and absorption." (David Sarnoff)

♟️Strategic Management: Belief (Just the Quotes)

"Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; [...]" (Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World", 1914)

"For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Most of our beliefs about complex organizations follow from one or the other of two distinct strategies. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment. A newer tradition enables us to conceive of the organization as an open system, indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty." (James D Thompson, "Organizations in Action", 1967)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least." (Jacques Barzun, "The Culture We Deserve", 1989)

"A model can not be proved to be correct; at best it can only be found to be reasonably consistant and not to contradict some of our beliefs of what reality is." (Richard W Hamming, "The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers", 1991)

"Enterprise Engineering is based on the belief that an enterprise, as any other complex system can be designed or improved in an orderly fashion thus giving a better overall result than ad hoc organisation and design." (Peter Bernus et al, "Possibilities and limitations of reusing enterprise models", 1994)

"Beliefs are those ideas we take as true and use to guide our actions. We all have beliefs about what sort of people we are and what we are capable of. These beliefs act as permissions for or limitations on what we do. When we believe something is possible, we will try it; if we believe it impossible, we will not." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998) 

"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)

"Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive." (Nassim N Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness", 2001)

"The danger arises when a culture takes its own story as the absolute truth, and seeks to impose this truth on others as the yardstick of all knowledge and belief." (F David Peat, "From Certainty to Uncertainty", 2002)

"Enterprise architecture (EA) promotes the belief that an enterprise, as a complex system, can be designed or improved in an orderly fashion achieving better overall results than ad-hoc organisation and design. EA is a co-operative effort of designers, analysts and managers and uses enterprise models in the process [...] enterprise models carry meaning. This resulted in requirements for the enterprise engineering process, which - if not met - can limit the viability of the process. The analysis of the same factors resulted in requirements for improved Enterprise Modelling Tools." (Peter Bernus, "Enterprise models for enterprise architecture and ISO9000: 2000", 2003) 

"The less sure managers are of their opinions, the more vigorously they defend them. Managers do not waste their time defending beliefs they hold strongly – they just assert them. Nor do they bother to refute what they strongly believe is false." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management", 2006)

"An organization’s culture is the underlying set of key values, beliefs, understandings, and norms shared by employees. These underlying values and norms may pertain to ethical behavior, commitment to employees, efficiency, or customer service, and they provide the glue to hold organization members together. An organization’s culture is unwritten but can be observed in its stories, slogans, ceremonies, dress, and office layout." (Richard L Daft, "Organization Theory and Design", 3rd Ed., 2010)

"Thorough rethinking of all business processes, job definitions, management systems, organizational structure, work flow, and underlying assumptions and beliefs. BPR’s main objective is to break away from old ways of working, and effect radical (not incremental) redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical areas (such as cost, quality, service, and response time) through the in-depth use of information technology." (Elvira Rolón, "Healthcare Process Development with BPMN", 2010)

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012)

"A belief model is clung to not because it is 'correct'  - there is no way to know this - but rather because it has worked in the past and must cumulate a record of failure before it is worth discarding. In general, there may be a constant slow turnover of hypotheses acted upon. One could speak of this as a system of temporarily fulfilled expectations - beliefs or models or hypotheses that are temporarily fulfilled (though not perfectly), which give way to different beliefs or hypotheses when they cease to be fulfilled." (W Brian Arthur, "Complexity and the Economy", 2015)

"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)

♟️Strategic Management: Hierarchies (Just the Quotes)

"Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. - comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior." (Douglas McGregor, 'The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"It is probable that one day we shall begin to draw organization charts as a series of linked groups rather than as a hierarchical structure of individual 'reporting' relationships." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"General systems theory is the scientific exploration of 'wholes' and 'wholeness' which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness - these are a few of such general system properties." (Ervin László, "Introduction to Systems Philosophy", 1972)

"In the objectives system, the corporation's aims, or plans, are broken down into a hierarchy of lesser aims or plans; and the grand total of all those objectives adds up to those of the corporation. Then all the executives have to do is meet their planned and agreed objectives and - hey presto - the corporation does the same. Perfection in management, at last, has arrived, except that it hasn't and won't." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)

"With the changes in technological complexity, especially in information technology, the leadership task has changed. Leadership in a networked organization is a fundamentally different thing from leadership in a traditional hierarchy." (Edgar Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)

"Ethical pressures and decisions are viewed through the prism of one's own personal values. The distinction between personal and organizational values, however, often becomes blurred, especially the longer one stays with a particular organization and/or advances up the hierarchial ladder." (Warren H Schmidt & Barry Z Posner, Public Administration Review, 1986)

"Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"The premise here is that the hierarchy lines on the chart are also the only communication conduit. Information can flow only along the lines. [...] The hierarchy lines are paths of authority. When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that's a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)

"An ecology provides the special formations needed by organizations. Ecologies are: loose, free, dynamic, adaptable, messy, and chaotic. Innovation does not arise through hierarchies. As a function of creativity, innovation requires trust, openness, and a spirit of experimentation - where random ideas and thoughts can collide for re-creation." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"Hierarchy adapts knowledge to the organization; a network adapts the organization to the knowledge." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"DevOps recognizes the importance of culture. The acronym CAMS (culture, automation, measurement, and sharing) is used to encapsulate its key themes. Culture is acknowledged as all important in making development and IT operations work together effectively. But what is culture in this context? It is not so much about an informal dress code, flexible hours, or a free in-house cafeteria as it is about how decisions are taken, norms of behavior, protocols of communication, and the ways of navigating hierarchy and bureaucracy to get things done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Some hierarchy is essential for the effective functioning of an organization. Eliminating hierarchy has the frequent side effect of slowing down decision making and diffusing accountability." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

♟️Strategic Management: Targets (Just the Quotes)

"[...] 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)

"Targets set by individual managers are relevant to the company's goals because the entire management group is involved in the total planning process." (Walter S Wilkstrom, "Managing by-and-with Objectives", 1968)

"The Balanced Scorecard has its greatest impact when it is deployed to drive organizational change. [...] The Balanced Scorecard is primarily a mechanism for strategy implementation, not for strategy formulation. It can accommodate either approach for formulating business unit strategy-starting from the customer perspective, or starting from excellent internal-business-process capabilities. For whatever approach that SBU senior executives use to formulate their strategy, the Balanced Scorecard will provide an invaluable mechanism for translating that strategy into specific objectives, measures, and targets, and monitoring the implementation of that strategy during subsequent periods." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"The Enterprise Architecture is the explicit description of the current and desired relationships among business and management process and information technology. It describes the 'target' situation which the agency wishes to create and maintain by managing its IT portfolio." (Franklin D Raines, 1997)

"Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"A software team can get severely constrained when a velocity target is imposed on it. Velocity works well as a measurement, not as a target. Targets limit choice of actions. A team may find itself unable to address technical debt if it is constrained by velocity targets. At a certain threshold of constraints, team members lose the sense of empowerment (autonomy)." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015) 

"In order to control where a team devotes its energies, all you need to do is to impose a bunch of targets and track progress at regular intervals. For greater control, increase the range of targets and track more frequently. This is called micromanagement and is universally detested by teams. Doing so increases reporting overhead but rarely improves team performance." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Self-organizing teams need autonomy. […] Autonomy allows us to act on the opportunity that purpose provides. Mastery then lets us service the opportunity with a degree of excellence. Targets distort purpose, limit autonomy, and disregard mastery." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015) 

"Teams motivated by targets tend not to take ownership of problems. They attend only to those aspects that affect targets and leave the rest to be picked up by someone else. To some extent, the problem isn’t the target itself but rather the incentive behind the target." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"When a team is held to targets, it begins to look out for itself. It prioritizes the achievement of its own targets over that of its neighboring teams or parent organizational unit. We know from systems theory that local optima do not necessarily lead to global optimum. On the contrary, a global optimum may call for all subsystems to be at local suboptima." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"An effective goal management system - an OKR system - links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large and small. Most important, it expands our limits. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

♟️Strategic Management: Information (Just the Quotes)

"Information, that is imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained." (William Playfair, "The Commercial and Political Atlas", 1786)

"A man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him no news, or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy, or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process and make him somewhat less than a man." (Arthur H Sulzberger, [speech] 1948)

"Every person seems to have a limited capacity to assimilate information, and if it is presented to him too rapidly and without adequate repetition, this capacity will be exceeded and communication will break down." (R Duncan Luce, "Developments in Mathematical Psychology", 1960)

"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)

"Most MIS [Management Information Systems] designers 'determine' what information is needed by asking managers what information they would like to have. This is based on the (often erroneous) assumption that managers know that information they need and want it." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)

"The lack of needed information, and of adequately informed judgments on it, often betrays intelligent and sincere public leaders into making reckless and inconsistent promises to the public. Much of the 'credibility gap' arises from this failure of governmental processes to produce needed current facts and information." (Luther H Gulick, "Program Planning for National Goals", 1968)

"It is more important for the manager to get his information quickly and efficiently than to get it formally." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work", 1973)

"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"Information may be accumulated in files, but it must be retrieved to be of use in decision making." (Kenneth J Arrow, "The Limits of Organization", 1974)

"Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload." (Richard S Wurman, "What-If, Could-Be", 1976)

"We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows." (Warren G Bennis, "Why leaders can't lead: the unconscious conspiracy continues", 1976)

"When information is centralized and controlled, those who have it are extremely influential. Since information is [usually] localized in control subsystems, these subsystems have a great deal of organization influence." (Henry L Tosi & Stephen J Carroll, "Management", 1976)

"The greater the uncertainty, the greater the amount of decision making and information processing. It is hypothesized that organizations have limited capacities to process information and adopt different organizing modes to deal with task uncertainty. Therefore, variations in organizing modes are actually variations in the capacity of organizations to process information and make decisions about events which cannot be anticipated in advance." (John K Galbraith, "Organization Design", 1977)

"The information we have is not what we want. The information we want is not what we need. The information we need is not available." (John Peers, "1,001 Logical Laws", 1979)

"Managers often try to give others the feeling that they are participating in the decision process. When a manager involves people in a problem for which he has adequate information and clear criteria for making an acceptable decision, he is engaging in pseudoconsultation. When he involves others in lengthy discussions of trivial problems, he is engaging in pseudoparticipation. Most people recognize these ceremonies as a waste of time." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)

"Given a multilevel organization having component groups which perform a variety of functions in order to accomplish a unified objective, an MIS [Management Information System] is an integrated structure of data bases and information flow over all levels and components, whereby information collection and transfer is optimized to meet the needs of the organization." (Larry E Long, "Manager's Guide to Computers and Information Systems", 1983)

"Individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as middle managers, because they exert great power within the organization." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Information gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which is why I choose to spend so much of my day doing it." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"There is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers. That is to visit a particular place in the company and observe what's going on there." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"No talent in management is worth more than the ability to master facts - not just any facts, but the ones that provide the best answers. Mastery thus involves knowing what facts you want; where to dig for them; how to dig; how to process the mined ore; and how to use the precious nuggets of information that are finally in your hand. The process can be laborious - which is why it is so often botched." (Robert Heller, "The Supermanagers", 1984)

"Try as far as possible to pass on information rather than your conclusions. Your conclusions, if they are right, are part of your competitive advantage. If they are wrong and you pass them on they may come back to haunt you." (Mary A Allison & Eric Allison, "Managing Up, Managing Down", 1984)

"A real challenge for some organizations is to build more qualitative information into their formal systems. One method used in some companies is to request a written narrative with each submission of statistics from the field. Another method is to hold periodic, indepth discussions involving several managers from different levels so that each can contribute whatever qualitative data are available to him." (Larry E Greiner et al, "Human Relations", 1986)

"People will make reasonable decisions if they are given proper information." (Thom Serrani, Management Review, 1986)

"An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility." (Jan Carlzon, "Moments of Truth", 1987)

"[...] as the planning process proceeds to a specific financial or marketing state, it is usually discovered that a considerable body of 'numbers' is missing, but needed numbers for which there has been no regular system of collection and reporting; numbers that must be collected outside the firm in some cases. This serendipity usually pays off in a much better management information system in the form of reports which will be collected and reviewed routinely." (William H. Franklin Jr., Financial Strategies, 1987)

"Executives have to start understanding that they have certain legal and ethical responsibilities for information under their control." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)

"Practically all large corporations insure their data bases against loss or damage or against their inability to gain access to them. Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, 'Information'; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it." (Grace M Hopper [speech] 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)

"There are only two ways to get people to support corporate change. You should give employees the information they need to understand the reasons for change, and put enough influence behind the information to [gain their] support." (Carla O'Dell, 1987)

"There is a profound difference between information and meaning." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"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)

"Information needs representation. The idea that it is possible to communicate information in a 'pure' form is fiction. Successful risk communication requires intuitively clear representations. Playing with representations can help us not only to understand numbers (describe phenomena) but also to draw conclusions from numbers (make inferences). There is no single best representation, because what is needed always depends on the minds that are doing the communicating." (Gerd Gigerenzer, "Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you", 2002)

♟️Strategic Management: Quality (Just the Quotes)

"Every business has its own particular sort of rat holes, through which its profits are carried piecemeal, and in quantities hardly noticeable at the time, but which aggregate thousands every year. The best way to plug these sources of loss is by accumulating data in regard to them and then keeping this data prominently before the executive."  (Allan C Haskell, "How to Make and Use Graphic Charts", 1919)

"In large-scale organizations, the factual approach must be constantly nurtured by high-level executives. The more layers of authority through which facts must pass before they reach the decision maker, the greater the danger that they will be suppressed, modified, or softened, so as not to displease the 'brass"' For this reason, high-level executives must keep reaching for facts or soon they won't know what is going on. Unless they make visible efforts to seek and act on facts, major problems will not be brought to their attention, the quality of their decisions will decline, and the business will gradually get out of touch with its environment." (Marvin Bower, "The Will to Manage", 1966)

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world." (John Updike, "They Thought They Were Better", TIME magazine, 1980)

"[Enterprise Architecture is] the set of descriptive representations (i. e., models) that are relevant for describing an Enterprise such that it can be produced to management's requirements (quality) and maintained over the period of its useful life. (John Zachman, 1987)

"Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’​​​​​​t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’​​​​​​re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)

"Conventional process structures are fragmented and piecemeal, and they lack the integration necessary to maintain quality and service. They are breeding grounds for tunnel vision, as people tend to substitute the narrow goals of their particular department for the larger goals of the process as a whole. When work is handed off from person to person and unit to unit, delays and errors are inevitable. Accountability blurs, and critical issues fall between the cracks." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"Various perspectives exist in an enterprise, such as efficiency, quality, and cost. Any system for enterprise engineering must be capable of representing and managing these different perspectives in a well-defined way." (Michael Grüninger & Mark S Fox, "Benchmarking - Theory and Practice", 1995)

"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)

"Issues of quality, timeliness and change are the conditions that are forcing us to face up to the issues of enterprise architecture. The precedent of all the older disciplines known today establishes the concept of architecture as central to the ability to produce quality and timely results and to manage change in complex products. Architecture is the cornerstone for containing enterprise frustration and leveraging technology innovations to fulfill the expectations of a viable and dynamic Information Age enterprise." (John Zachman, "Enterprise Architecture: The Issue of The Century", 1997)

"Quality goals that affect product salability should be based primarily on meeting or exceeding market quality. Because the market and the competition undoubtedly will be changing while the quality planning project is under way, goals should be set so as to meet or beat the competition estimated to be prevailing when the project is completed." (Joseph M Juran, "The quality planning process", 1999)

"To attain quality, it is well to begin by establishing the 'vision' for the organization, along with policies and goals. Conversion of goals into results (making quality happen) is then done through managerial processes - sequences of activities that produce the intended results." (Joseph M Juran, "How to think about quality", 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)

The software architecture of a system or a family of systems has one of the most significant impacts on the quality of an organization's enterprise architecture. While the design of software systems concentrates on satisfying the functional requirements for a system, the design of the software architecture for systems concentrates on the nonfunctional or quality requirements for systems. These quality requirements are concerns at the enterprise level. The better an organization specifies and characterizes the software architecture for its systems, the better it can characterize and manage its enterprise architecture. By explicitly defining the systems software architectures, an organization will be better able to reflect the priorities and trade-offs that are important to the organization in the software that it builds." (James McGovern et al, "A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture", 2004)

"Achieving a high level of data quality is hard and is affected significantly by organizational and ownership issues. In the short term, bandaging problems rather than addressing the root causes is often the path of least resistance." (Cindi Howson, "Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to making BI a killer App", 2008)

"Data quality is such an important issue, and yet one that is not well understood or that excites business users. It’s often perceived as being a problem for IT to handle when it’s not: it’s for the business to own and correct." (Cindi Howson, "Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to making BI a killer App", 2008)

"Thorough rethinking of all business processes, job definitions, management systems, organizational structure, work flow, and underlying assumptions and beliefs. BPR’s main objective is to break away from old ways of working, and effect radical (not incremental) redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical areas (such as cost, quality, service, and response time) through the in-depth use of information technology." (Elvira Rolón, "Healthcare Process Development with BPMN", 2010)

♟️Strategic Management: Opportunities (Just the Quotes)

"No man can tell what the future may bring forth, and small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises." (Demosthenes, "Ad Leptinum", cca. 4th century BC)

"Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages." (Samuel Johnson, "The Idler", 1801)

"Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. [...] Resources, to produce results, must be allocated to opportunities rather than to problems." (Peter F Drucker, "Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-taking Decisions", 1964)

"The best way to come to grips with one’s own business knowledge is to look at the things the business has done well, and the things it apparently does poorly. […] Knowledge is a perishable commodity. It has to be reaffirmed, relearned, repracticed all the time. One has to work constantly at regaining one’s specific excellence. […] The right knowledge is the knowledge needed to exploit the market opportunities." (Peter F Drucker, "Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-taking Decisions", 1964)

"A natural companion to the competitive advantage is the synergy component of strategy. This requires that opportunities within the scope possess characteristics which will enhance synergy." (Igor Ansoff, "Corporate Strategy", 1965)

"Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity" (Warren G Bennis, "Why Leaders Can't Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues", 1976) 

"Needs and opportunities are always there. We just have to drive ourselves to find the practical ones." (Taiichi Ohno, "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production", 1978)

"No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind Of The Strategist", 1982)

"No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success." (Peter Drucker, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship", 1985)

"Opportunities abound for linking productivity to business strategy." (John L Grahn, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"The opportunities and threats existing in any situation always exceed the resources needed to exploit the opportunities or avoid the threats. Thus, strategy is essentially a problem of allocating resources. If strategy is to be successful, it must allocate superior resources against a decisive opportunity." (William Cohen, "Winning on the Marketing Front: The corporate manager's game plan", 1986)

"Problems can become opportunities when the right people come together." (Robert Redford, Harvard Business Review, 1987)

"But business fosters a particular fondness for tactics. That emphasis can lead to an imbalance that reduces the opportunities for success. We get so wrapped up in tactics - doing things to meet a quota or deadline, executing someone else's orders - that we miss the reason behind the tactics. Eventually the purpose of the tactic fades away, but the rules, quotas, deadlines, forms, and frustration remain." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"Effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems." (Stephen Covey, "Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People", 1994)

"The key to successful brainstorming lies in the team's willingness to suspend disbelief and experiment with new ways of looking at opportunities - something that can be done with a Morpho Box. At this point, concentrating on only the positive possibilities without reference to the inherent problems makes the process work." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"Don’t solve problems; pursue opportunities. […] In both the short and long term, our ability to solve social and economic problems will be limited primarily to our lack of imagination in seizing opportunities, rather than trying to optimize solutions. There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)

"[...] a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Clear goals, multiple strategies, clear roles and responsibilities, boldness, teamwork, speed, flexibility, the ability to change, managing risk, and seizing opportunities when they arise are important characteristics in gaining objectives." (Margaret Y Chu, "Blissful Data", 2004)

"[...] incomplete, inaccurate, and invalid data can cause problems for an organization. These problems are not only embarrassing and awkward but will also cause the organization to lose customers, new opportunities, and market share." (Margaret Y Chu, "Blissful Data", 2004)

"Decision making is the process of identifying problems and opportunities and then resolving them. Decision making involves effort before and after the actual choice." (Richard L Daft & Dorothy Marcic, "Understanding Management" 5th Ed., 2006)

"Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients - and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish." (Nassim N Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", 2007) 

"Systemic problems trace back in the end to worldviews. But worldviews themselves are in flux and flow. Our most creative opportunity of all may be to reshape those worldviews themselves. New ideas can change everything." (Anthony Weston, "How to Re-Imagine the World", 2007)

"Every moment – every blink – is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction." (Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", 2008)

"Synergy is the combined action that occurs when people work together to create new alternatives and solutions. In addition, the greatest opportunity for synergy occurs when people have different viewpoints, because the differences present new opportunities. The essence of synergy is to value and respect differences and take advantage of them to build on strengths and compensate for weaknesses." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"With respect to SWOT, threats are represented by the competitive products or their characteristics that offer the competition the best opportunity to damage your reputation." (Steven G Haines, "The Product Manager's Desk Reference", 2008)

"Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities." (Bill Gates,  "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009) 

"Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error." (Warren Buffett, "Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha", 2009)

"Implementing new systems provides organizations with unique opportunities not only to improve their technologies, but to redefine and improve key business processes. Ultimately, for organizations to consider these new systems successes, the post-legacy environment must ensure that business processes, client end users, and systems work together." (Phil Simon, "Why New Systems Fail: An Insider’s Guide to Successful IT Projects", 2010)

"For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched." (Paul Allen, "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft", 2011)

"Data are essential, but performance improvements and competitive advantage arise from analytics models that allow managers to predict and optimize outcomes. More important, the most effective approach to building a model rarely starts with the data; instead it originates with identifying the business opportunity and determining how the model can improve performance." (Dominic Barton & David Court, "Making Advanced Analytics Work for You", 2012) 

"Even with simple and usable models, most organizations will need to upgrade their analytical skills and literacy. Managers must come to view analytics as central to solving problems and identifying opportunities - to make it part of the fabric of daily operations." (Dominic Barton & David Court, "Making Advanced Analytics Work for You", 2012)

"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)

"A clear, thoughtful mission statement, developed collaboratively with and shared with managers, employees, and often customers, provides a shared sense of purpose, direction, and opportunity." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"Sometimes, the best way to broaden your search is to look inside your own organization. Great solutions often come along at the wrong time, and the sprint can be a perfect opportunity to rejuvenate them. Also look for ideas that are in progress but unfinished - and even old ideas that have been abandoned." (Jake Knapp et al, "Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days", 2016)

"[...] strategy is about determining the problems and opportunities in front of you, defining them properly, and shaping a course of action that will give your business the greatest advantage. Balancing problem solving with creating and exploiting new opportunities through imagination and analysis is the cornerstone of a great strategy." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

♟️Strategic Management: Patterns (Just the Quotes)

"An adjustive effort of any kind is preceded by a decision to act or not act along a given line, and the decision is itself preceded by a definition of the situation, that is to say, an interpretation, or point of view, and eventually a policy and a behavior pattern. In this way quick judgments and decisions are made at every point in everyday life. Thus when approached by a man or beast in a lonely spot we first define the situation, make a judgment, as to whether the object is dangerous or harmless, and then decide" (make up our mind") what we are going to do about it." (William I Thomas, "Primitive Behavior", 1937)

"The pattern of personal characteristics of the leader must bear some relevant relationship to the characteristics, activities, and goals of the followers. [...] It becomes clear that an adequate analysis of leadership involves not only a study of leadership but also of situations." (R M Stodgill, "Journal of Psychology", 1948)

"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)

"In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind Of The Strategist", 1982) 

"No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind Of The Strategist", 1982)

"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)

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static 'snapshots'. It is a set of general principles- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management. [...] During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)

"[...] information feedback about the real world not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames and decision rules but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, processed and interpreted by a different decision rule, now yields a different decision. Altering the structure of our systems then alters their patterns of behavior. The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view and then redesign our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"Systems thinking means the ability to see the synergy of the whole rather than just the separate elements of a system and to learn to reinforce or change whole system patterns. Many people have been trained to solve problems by breaking a complex system, such as an organization, into discrete parts and working to make each part perform as well as possible. However, the success of each piece does not add up to the success of the whole. to the success of the whole. In fact, sometimes changing one part to make it better actually makes the whole system function less effectively." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2002)

"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)

"Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness [...] the three-way coevolution of physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs [...] accounts for the patterns of change and growth we see in the economy." (Eric D Beinhocker, "The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics", 2006)

"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)

"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)

"Systems thinking is a mental discipline and framework for seeing patterns and interrelationships. It is important to see organizational systems as a whole because of their complexity. Complexity can overwhelm managers, undermining confidence. When leaders can see the structures that underlie complex situations, they can facilitate improvement. But doing that requires a focus on the big picture." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2008)

"A good strategy is one that takes into account not only the requirements of the position, but also the opponent's strategy and tactics. Strategy lies between science and art. It supports the ability to evaluate positions, recognize patterns and imagine adequate plans." (Mihai Suba, "Dynamic Chess Strategy", 2010)

"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." (Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow", 2019)

"Enterprise Architecture is not a method, principle or doctrine – It is a way of thinking enabled by patterns, frameworks, standards etc. essentially seeking to align both the technology ecosystem and landscape with the business trajectory driven by both the internal and external forces." (Daljit R Banger)

♟️Strategic Management: Objectives (Just the Quotes)

"The published objectives of a company will never reflect all the goals and values of the corporation as an institution or its management as human beings."(Richard Eells, California Management Review, 1959)

"Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"The decision which achieves organization objectives must be both (1) technologically sound and (2) carried out by people. If we lose sight of the second requirement or if we assume naively that people can be made to carry out whatever decisions are technically sound - we run the risk of decreasing rather than increasing the effectiveness of the organization." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operations so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"It is an axiom of program budgeting that the budget should facilitate the process of alternative methods of obtaining objectives." (Chester Wright, "Program Budgeting and Cost Benefit Analysis", 1969)

"[One] must not always assume that obscure and obfuscated objectives are totally lacking in function.(Harley H Hinrichs, "Program Budgeting and Cost Benefit Analysis", 1969)

"[Management by objectives is] a process whereby the superior and the subordinate managers of an enterprise jointly identify its common goals, define each individual's major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members." (Robert House, "Administrative Science Quarterly", 1971)

"A manager [...] sets objectives [...] organizes [...] motivates and communicates [...] measure[s] [...] develops people. Every manager does these thingsknowingly or not. A manager may do them well, or may do them wretchedly, but always does them." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)

"Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)

"[...] 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)

"Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy; it is just a waste of resources." (Bruce Henderson, Henderson on Corporate Strategy, 1979)

"There are always 'class or prestige' gaps between various levels of management. There are also functional gaps between working units of the organization. If we superimpose the management gaps on top of the functional gaps, we find that companies are made up of small operational islands that refuse to communicate with one another for fear that giving up information may strengthen their opponents. The project manager’s responsibility is to get these islands to communicate cross-functionally toward common goals and objectives." (Harold Kerzner, "Project Management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling", 1979)

"Given a multilevel organization having component groups which perform a variety of functions in order to accomplish a unified objective, an MIS [Management Information System] is an integrated structure of data bases and information flow over all levels and components, whereby information collection and transfer is optimized to meet the needs of the organization." (Larry E Long, "Manager's Guide to Computers and Information Systems", 1983)

"Management by objectives is a philosophy of managing that is based on identifying purposes, objectives, and desired results, establishing a realistic program for obtaining these results, and evaluating performance in achieving them." (R Henry Miglione, "An MBO Approach to Long-Range Planning", 1983)

"Public accounting taught me analytical approaches to business problems, objective reasoning, and the highest order of discipline in making factual presentations." (Harold Geneen, "Managing", 1984)

"Management has a responsibility to explain to the employee how the routine job contributes to the business's objectives. If management cannot explain the value of the job, then it should be eliminated and the employee reassigned." (Douglas M Reid, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"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)

"[...] strategic planning and crisis management are complimentary. They coexist comfortably because both deal with the management of change. Crisis management concentrates on those brief moments of instability that must be dealt with first in order to get on with the larger and less time-sensitive job of reaching strategic objectives." (Gerald C Meyers, "When It Hits the Fan", 1986)

"The 'management by objectives' school [...] suggests that detailed objectives be spelled out at all levels in the corporation. This method is feasible at lower levels of management, but it becomes unworkable at the upper levels. The top manager must think out objectives in detail, but ordinarily some of the objectives must be withheld, or at least communicated to the organization in modest doses. A conditioning process that may stretch over months or years is necessary in order to prepare the organization for radical departures from what it is currently striving to attain." (H Edward Wrapp, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)

"Top managers are currently inundated with reams of information concerning the organizational units under their supervision. Behind this information explosion lies a seemingly logical assumption made by information specialists and frequently accepted by line managers: if top management can be supplied with more 'objective' and 'accurate' quantified information, they will make 'better' judgments about the performance of their operating units. [...] A research study we have recently completed indicates that quantified performance information may have a more limited role than is currently assumed or envisioned; in fact, managers rely more on subjective information than they do on so called 'objective' statistics in assessing the overall performance of lower-level units." (Larry E. Greiner et al, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)

"The most important reason for our success is we set our objectives and make sure we follow through on them." (Annette B Roux, The New York Times, 1987)

"[management by objectives] has become one more way to make organizations behave like machines." (Julien Phillips, "Success", 1988)

"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)

"A process perspective sees not individual tasks in isolation, but the entire collection of tasks that contribute to a desired outcome. Narrow points of view are useless in a process context. It just won't do for each person to be concerned exclusively with his or her own limited responsibility, no matter how well these responsibilities are met. When that occurs, the inevitable result is working at cross–purpose, misunderstanding, and the optimization of the part at the expense of the whole. Process work requires that everyone involved be directed toward a common goal; otherwise, conflicting objectives and parochial agendas impair the effort."  (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

"An OBJECTIVE […] is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking - and fuzzy execution." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

♟️Strategic Management: Tactics (Just the Quotes)

"But when one comes to the effect of the engagement, where material successes turn into motives for further action, the intellect alone is decisive. In brief, tactics will present far fewer difficulties to the theorist than will strategy." (Carl von Clausewitz, "On War", 1832)

"In a tactical situation one is able to see at least half the problem with the naked eye, whereas in strategy everything has to be guessed at and presumed." (Carl von Clausewitz, "On War", 1832)

"Strategy is concerned with the setting of an aim and the forming of schemes. Tactics are concerned with the execution of the schemes. Strategy is abstract, tactics are concrete. Expressing it in a popular way: Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." (Dr. Max Euwe, "Strategy & Tactices in chess", 1937)

"A policy therefore might be likened to strategy, the broad, overall, long term conception which gives direction and purpose to the tactics of immediately daily operations and decisions." (Lawrence K. Frank, "National Policy for the Family", 1948)

"All organizations engage in the three basic activities of strategy, tactics, and logistics. Strategy defines the job. Tactics does the job. Logistics provides the resources to get the job done - not only material resources, but also manpower, funds, and data." (Robert L Siegel, 1987)

"Strategy means abstract thinking and planning, as opposed to tactics, which are the individual operations used to implement strategy. Tactics are specific; strategy is general. Tactics tend to be immediate, strategy long-term." (Bruce Pandolfini, "Weapons of Chess: An omnibus of chess strategy", 1989)

"But business fosters a particular fondness for tactics. That emphasis can lead to an imbalance that reduces the opportunities for success. We get so wrapped up in tactics - doing things to meet a quota or deadline, executing someone else's orders - that we miss the reason behind the tactics. Eventually the purpose of the tactic fades away, but the rules, quotas, deadlines, forms, and frustration remain." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"One of the issues involved in moving strategy making down into the business organization concerns common understanding or focus. To carry out tactics, we do not need to share common objectives. But with strategy, we must interpret conditions, events, and actions in a similar manner to have any hope of creating a successful plan." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"Strategy and tactics. Thinking and doing. Vision and execution. Whatever you call it, finding a balance between these two powerful forces of success remains a lifelong search for the best in any field: military leader, artist, baseball coach, or marketing manager." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"The difference between strategy and tactics is that tactics get you down to the 'nitty-gritty' details of exactly how you are going to do the work." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"However, the dynamic changes and laws should be understood, not only from the point of view of strategy and tactics but also from that of the time of the development of ideas." (Vlastimil Jansa, "Dynamics of Chess Strategy", 2003)

"Strategy and tactics often work hand in glove." (Vlastimil Jansa, "Dynamics of Chess Strategy", 2003)

"Tactical modeling identifies necessary operational systems, functional areas, or general project areas. Priorities for development are set at the tactical level." (Alan Chmura & J Mark Heumann, "Logical Data Modeling: What it is and How to do it", 2005)

"A good strategy is one that takes into account not only the requirements of the position, but also the opponent's strategy and tactics. Strategy lies between science and art. It supports the ability to evaluate positions, recognize patterns and imagine adequate plans." (Mihai Suba, "Dynamic Chess Strategy", 2010)

"Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." (Max Euwe)

♟️Strategic Management: Agility (Just the Quotes)

"An enterprise architecture can be thought of as a 'blueprint' or 'picture' which assists in the design of an enterprise. The enterprise architecture must define three things. First, what are the activities that an enterprise performs? Second, how should these activities be performed? And finally, how should the enterprise be constructed? Consequently, the architecture being developed will identify the essential processes performed by a virtual company, how the virtual company and the agile enterprises involved in the virtual company will perform these processes, and include a methodology for the rapid reconfiguration of the virtual enterprise." (William Barnett et al, "An architecture for the virtual enterprise", Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1994)

"An Enterprise Architecture is a dynamic and powerful tool that helps organisations understand their own structure and the way they work. It provides a ‘map’ of the enterprise and a ‘route planner’ for business and technology change. A well-constructed Enterprise Architecture provides a foundation for the ‘Agile’ business." (Bob Jarvis, "Enterprise Architecture: Understanding the Bigger Picture - A Best Practice Guide for Decision Makers in IT", 2003)

"Many problems stem from a premature attempt at scaling Agile within the organization. The nature of the transformation is such that it is unrealistic to plan upfront for an 18-month organization-wide change program to go from status quo to continuous delivery. People try nevertheless, and when the outcomes don’t materialize, they say Agile doesn’t work." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"There is common but flawed notion in enterprise IT circles that maintenance work requires less skill than full-scale development. As a result, project sponsors looking to reduce cost opt for a different team of lower-cost people for maintenance work. This is false economy. It hurts the larger business outcome and reduces IT agility." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Agile is more a 'direction', than an 'end'. Transforming to Agile culture means the business knows the direction they want to go on." (Pearl Zhu, "Digital Agility: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile", 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." (Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow", 2019)

"Some folks think that Agile is about going fast. It’s not. It’s never been about going fast. Agile is about knowing, as early as possible, just how screwed we are." (Robert C Martin, "Clean Agile: Back to Basics", 2019) 

"Data architects often turn to graphs because they are flexible enough to accommodate multiple heterogeneous representations of the same entities as described by each of the source systems. With a graph, it is possible to associate underlying records incrementally as data is discovered. There is no need for big, up-front design, which serves only to hamper business agility. This is important because data fabric integration is not a one-off effort and a graph model remains flexible over the lifetime of the data domains." (Jesús Barrasa et al, "Knowledge Graphs: Data in Context for Responsive Businesses", 2021)