♟️Strategic Management: Values (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)

"The leadership and other processes of the organization must be such as to ensure a maximum probability that in all interactions and all interactions and all relationships with the organization each member will, in the light of his background, values, and expectations, view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his sense of personal worth and importance." (Rensis Likert, "New patterns of management", 1961)

"Modern organization makes demands on the individual to learn something he has never been able to do before: to use organization intelligently, purposefully, deliberately, responsibly [...] to manage organization [...] to make [...] his job in it serve his ends, his values, his desire to achieve." (Peter F Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity, 1968)

"The advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pressures that arise when the members work closely together, share the same set of values and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress." (Irving Janis, "Victims of Groupthink", 1972) 

"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)

"Organizational values are best transmitted when they are acted out, and not merely announced, by the people responsible for training, or by the people who become role-models for recruits. The manager of an organization is a role-model ex officio and may have an astonishing ability to communicate organizational values to recruits in fleeting contacts with them. That is the age-old secret of successful generalship, and it is applied every day by charismatic leaders in other fields, whose commitments to their roles is so dramatic that they strike awe into the recruits who observe them in action." (Theodore Caplow, "Managing an Organization", 1983)

"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)

"Change occurs only when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity." (John Naisbett & Patricia Aburdene, "Re-inventing the Corporation", 1985)

"A network is not a team. Nor is it a support system, which many women mistake it for. A man's network is the sum total of all those people with whom he barters. It is ever expanding among those of mutual interest and goals, not necessarily of mutual values and likes. They are the people with whom he does business, people who may join his team for some purpose, and others who may not." (Jinx Milea & Pauline Lyttle, "Why Jenny Can't Lead", 1986)

"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)

"The importance of top management commitment to organizational change is so well accepted that it is almost cliché to repeat the fact. We would therefore expect managerial values to be just as important in this area as in others that require strategic direction and leadership" (Thomas A Kochan,"The Mutual Gains Enterprise", 1994) 

"Values are social norms - they're personal, emotional, subjective, and arguable. All of us have values. [...] The question you must ask yourself is, Are your values based upon principles? In the last analysis, principles are natural laws - they're impersonal, factual, objective and self-evident. Consequences are governed by principles and behavior is governed by values; therefore, value principles." (Stephen R Covey, "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness", 2004)

"Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don’t become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines." (Robert C Martin, "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship", 2008)

"Mental models are representations of reality built in people’s minds. These models are based on arrangements of assumptions, judgments, and values. A main weakness of mental models is that people’s assumptions and judgments change over time and are applied in inconsistent ways when building explanations of the world." (Luis F Luna-Reyes, "System Dynamics to Understand Public Information Technology", 2008)

"For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It's not 'integrity'," it's 'always do the right thing'. It's not 'innovation', it's 'look at the problem from a different angle'. Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation." (Simon Sinek, "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action", 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) 

♟️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: 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: 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: 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: Goals (Just the Quotes)

"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 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)

"Linking the basic parts are communication, balance or system parts maintained in harmonious relationship with each other and decision making. The system theory include both man-machine and interpersonal relationships. Goals, man, machine, method, and process are woven together into a dynamic unity which reacts." (George R Terry, "Principles of Management", 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)

"Leadership is interpersonal influence, exercised in a situation, and directed, through the communication process, toward the attainment of a specified goal or goals." (Robert K Tanenbaum, "Leadership and Organization", 1961)

"[System dynamics] is an approach that should help in important top-management problems [...] The solutions to small problems yield small rewards. Very often the most important problems are but little more difficult to handle than the unimportant. Many [people] predetermine mediocre results by setting initial goals too low. The attitude must be one of enterprise design. The expectation should be for major improvement [...] The attitude that the goal is to explain behavior; which is fairly common in academic circles, is not sufficient. The goal should be to find management policies and organizational structures that lead to greater success." (Jay W Forrester, "Industrial Dynamics", 1961)

"It is of course desirable to work with manageable models which maximize generality, realism, and precision toward the overlapping but not identical goals of understanding, predicting, and modifying nature. But this cannot be done."(Richard Levins, "The strategy of model building in population biology", American Scientist Vol. 54 (4), 1966) 

"Good mission statements focus on a limited number of goals, stress the company's major policies and values, and define the company's major competitive scopes." (Philip Kotler, "Marketing Management", 1967)

"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)

"Cybernetics, based upon the principle of feedback or circular causal trains providing mechanisms for goal-seeking and self-controlling behavior." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"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 concept of organizational goals, like the concepts of power, authority, or leadership, has been unusually resistant to precise, unambiguous definition. Yet a definition of goals is necessary and unavoidable in organizational analysis. Organizations are established to do something; they perform work directed toward some end." (Charles Perrow, "Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View", 1970)

"[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)

"Every goal and every change from the status quo has a price tag on it." (Lyle E. Schaller, "The Change Agent", 1972)

"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)

"Management as an activity has always existed to make people’s desires through organized effort. Management facilitates the efforts of people in organized groups and arises when people seek to cooperate to achieve goals." (Daniel A Wren, "The evolution of management thought", 1972)

"[...] management should emphasize the contributions to total goals rather than the accomplishments of subgroup goals." (Paul Hersey & Kenneth H Blanchard, "Management of Organizational Behavior", 1972)

"The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization." (Paul Hersey & Kenneth H Blanchard, "Management of Organizational Behavior", 1972)

"No experiment on programmer performance should be undertaken without clear, explicit and reasonable goals unless that experiment is designed to measure the effect of unclear, implicit, or unreasonable goals." (Gerald M Weinberg & Edward L Schulman, "Human Factors", 1974)

"[...] 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)

"Overly optimistic goals nearly always result in one of two extremes. If the goal is seen as a must, then the division manager must 'go for broke'. This can result in reckless risk taking. More commonly [...] ultraconservative action. The reasoning is: 'Why take any chances to achieve an unattainable goal.'" (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)

"Superordinate goals - the goals above all others [..] play a pragmatic role by influencing implementation at the operational level. Because an executive cannot be everywhere at once, many decisions are made without his knowledge. What superordinate goals do, in effect, is provide employees with a "compass" and point their footsteps in the right direction [... to] independent decisions." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)

"No matter how high or how excellent technology may be and how much capital may be accumulated, unless the group of human beings which comprise the enterprise works together toward one unified goal, the enterprise is sure to go down the path of decline." (Takashi Ishihara, Cherry Blossoms and Robotics, 1983)

"Goals should be specific, realistic and measureable." (William G Dyer, "Strategies for Managing Change", 1984)

"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)

"A network is not a team. Nor is it a support system, which many women mistake it for. A man's network is the sum total of all those people with whom he barters. It is ever expanding among those of mutual interest and goals, not necessarily of mutual values and likes. They are the people with whom he does business, people who may join his team for some purpose, and others who may not." (Jinx Milea & Pauline Lyttle, "Why Jenny Can't Lead", 1986)

"An ability to tolerate ambiguity helps to avoid overdetermining one's goals. [...] As they proceed, peak performers can adjust goals. [...] What they are doing is balancing between change and stasis, between innovation and consolidation." (Charles Garfield, "Peak Performers", 1986)

"Goal setting has traditionally been based on past performance. This practice has tended to perpetuate the sins of the past." (Joseph M Juran,  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)

"A systematic effort must be made to emphasize the group instead of the individual. [...] Group goals and responsibilities can usually overcome any negative reactions to the individual and enforce a standard of cooperation that is attainable by persuasion or exhortation." (Eugene Raudsepp, MTS Digest, 1987)

"Setting goals can be the difference between success and failure. [...] Goals must not be defined so broadly that they cannot be quantified. Having quantifiable goals is an essential starting point if managers are to measure the results of their organization's activities. [...] Too often people mistake being busy for achieving goals." (Philip D Harvey & James D Snyder, Harvard Business Review, 1987)

"The manager must decide what type of group is wanted. If cooperation, teamwork, and synergy really matter, then one aims for high task interdependence. One structures the jobs of group members so that they have to interact frequently [...] to get their jobs done. Important outcomes are made dependent on group performance. The outcomes are distributed equally. If frenzied, independent activity is the goal, then one aims for low task interdependence and large rewards are distributed competitively and unequally." (Gregory P Shea & Richard A Guzzo, Sloan Management Review, 1987)

"The major fault in this process - and thus, in the way we were making decisions - is that it lacks an organizing framework. In pursuing a variety of goals and objectives, in whatever situation we manage, we often fail to see that some of them are in conflict and that the achievement of one might come at the expense of achieving another. In weighing up the actions we might take to reach our goals and objectives, we have no way to account for nature's complexity and only rarely factor it in." (Allan Savory & Jody Butterfield, "Holistic Management: A new framework for decision making", 1988)

"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]

"Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society." (Dominic Cadbury, "UK, Commission Report: Corporate Governance", 1992) 

"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)

"At the very least (there is certainly more), cybernetics implies a new philosophy about (1) what we can know, (2) about what it means for something to exist, and (3) about how to get things done. Cybernetics implies that knowledge is to be built up through effective goal-seeking processes, and perhaps not necessarily in uncovering timeless, absolute, attributes of things, irrespective of our purposes and needs." (Jeff Dooley, "Thoughts on the Question: What is Cybernetics", 1995)

"Cybernetics is a science of purposeful behavior. It helps us explain behavior as the continuous action of someone (or thing) in the process, as we see it, of maintaining certain conditions near a goal state, or purpose." (Jeff Dooley, "Thoughts on the Question: What is Cybernetics", 1995)

"Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium. Complex systems need a constant flow of energy to change, evolve and survive as complex entities. Equilibrium, symmetry and complete stability mean death. Just as the flow, of energy is necessary to fight entropy and maintain the complex structure of the system, society can only survive as a process. It is defined not by its origins or its goals, but by what it is doing." (Paul Cilliers,"Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems", 1998)

"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)

"Within image theory, it is suggested that important components of decision-making processes are the different 'images' that a person may use to evaluate choice options. Images may represent a person's principles, goals, or plans. Decision options may then match or not match these images and be adopted, rejected, considered further, depending on circumstances." (Deborah J Terry & Michael A Hogg, "Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Context: The Role of Norms and Group Membership", 1999)

"Just as dynamics arise from feedback, so too all learning depends on feedback. We make decisions that alter the real world; we gather information feedback about the real world, and using the new information we revise our understanding of the world and the decisions we make to bring our perception of the state of the system closer to our goals." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"The manager [...] is understood as one who observes the causal structure of an organization in order to be able to control it [...] This is taken to mean that the manager can choose the goals of the organization and design the systems or actions to realize those goals [...]. The possibility of so choosing goals and strategies relies on the predictability provided by the efficient and formative causal structure of the organization, as does the possibility of managers staying 'in control' of their organization's development. According to this perspective, organizations become what they are because of the choices made by their managers." (Ralph D Stacey et al, "Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?", 2000)

"There are two ways to approach prevention of these planning failures. We can plan not to lose, or we can plan to win. The two are not identical. Planning not to lose is defensive; while planning to win is aggressive. [...] the problem that planning is supposed to solve is simply, to build the right system at the right cost. If we take a defensive posture by planning not to lose, we will be able to hold people accountable for any failures; but at an enormous cost. If we take an aggressive posture and plan to win, we will be unafraid to make errors, and will continuously correct them to meet our goals." (Kent Beck & Martin Fowler, "Planning Extreme Programming", 2000)

"You basically get what you reward. If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values." (Stephen Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook", 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)

"The key element of an organization is not a building or a set of policies and procedures; organizations are made up of people and their relationships with one another. An organization exists when people interact with one another to perform essential functions that help attain goals." (Richard Daft, "The Leadership Experience" , 2002)

"If great managers are catalysts, speeding up the reaction between the individual's talents and the company's goals, then great leaders are alchemists. Somehow they are able to transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future." (Marcus Buckingham,"The One Thing You Need to Know", 2005)

"Management can be defined as the attainment of organizational goals in an effective and efficient manner through planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling organizational resources." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"Strategy is the serious work of figuring out how to translate vision and mission into action. Strategy is a general plan of action that describes resource allocation and other activities for dealing with the environment and helping the organization reach its goals. Like vision, strategy changes, but successful companies develop strategies that focus on core competence, develop synergy, and create value for customers. Strategy is implemented through the systems and structures that are the basic architecture for how things get done in the organization." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"A model is a representation in that it (or its properties) is chosen to stand for some other entity (or its properties), known as the target system. A model is a tool in that it is used in the service of particular goals or purposes; typically these purposes involve answering some limited range of questions about the target system." (Wendy S Parker, "Confirmation and Adequacy-for-Purpose in Climate Modelling", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 83, 2009)

"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)

"When organizations are unable to make new strategies - when people evade the work of choosing among different paths in the future - then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership's insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

"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 leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers. [...] Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership." (Garry Wills, "Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership", 2013)

"There's no single right way to accomplish your goals. Each of us has a number of avenues to reach our potential. The world constantly changes. Life often unfolds as a series of phases. Our potential is likely to evolve as the world evolves and as we continue to learn, grow, and develop our capabilities." (Robert S Kaplan, "What You're Really Meant To Do", 2013)

"Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine." (Chris Hadfield, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", 2013)

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals [...] characterize our age." (Albert Einstein)

"To tend, unfailingly, unflinchingly, towards a goal, is the secret of success." (Anna Pavlova)

♟️Strategic Management: Standards (Just the Quotes)

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Frederick W Taylor, "Principles of Scientific Management", 1911)

"Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject. [...] Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"How executives plan or what numbers they choose doesn't count; what does is the standard of performance they are ready to exact. The essence of any objective is that reaching it should be reasonable. The precondition is that you expect it to be met." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)

"Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." (Peter Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Challenges", 1973)

"Autonomation [..] performs a dual role. It eliminates overproduction, an important waste in manufacturing, and prevents the production of defective products. To accomplish this, standard work procedures, corresponding to each player's ability, must be adhered to at all times." (Taiichi Ohno, "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production", 1978)

"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)

"There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"A systematic effort must be made to emphasize the group instead of the individual. [...] Group goals and responsibilities can usually overcome any negative reactions to the individual and enforce a standard of cooperation that is attainable by persuasion or exhortation." (Eugene Raudsepp, MTS Digest, 1987)

"Quality is a matter of faith. You set your standards, and you have to stick by them no matter what. That's easy when you've got plenty of product on hand, but it's another thing when the freezer is empty and you've got a truck at the door waiting for the next shipment to come off the production line. That's when you really earn your reputation for quality." (Ben Cohen, Inc. Magazine, 1987)

"Without a standard there is no logical basis for making a decision or taking action." (Joseph M Juran, "Managerial Breakthrough: The Classic Book on Improving Management Performance", 1995)

"Arriving at standards is often easier said than done. Standard-making is a torturous, bickering process every time. And the end result is universally condemned - since it is the child of compromise. But for a standard to be effective, its adoption must be voluntary. There must be room to dissent by pursuing alternative standards at any time." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)

"A standard which is not revised after six months of its establishment, indicates that it is not in use." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"If you do not conduct sufficient analysis and if you do not have firm technical knowledge, you cannot carry out improvement or standardization, nor can you perform good control or prepare control charts useful for effective control." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Standardization can progress and management can be conducted only when management policy is defined." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Standardization enables delegation of authority, allowing the top management and executives to have time to think about future plans and policy, which is their most important duty." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Standardize technology so that you may accumulate technology organically in your company." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Standardization is not only for quality control. It involves establishing standards for managing the business well as well as for all employees to enjoy their work with comfort." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Standardization without needs or clear objectives tends to become ritual." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"The fact that standards are not revised demonstrates that your technology has stopped progressing." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"The key is to standardize every technically definable area, and leave what cannot be standardized to the skills." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"Top management is responsible for demonstrating methods for evaluating quality as well as standards." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"You cannot standardize or control effectively without intrinsic technology." (Kaoru Ishikawa)