"Managers need all the information they want. Most MIS designers 'determine' what information is needed by asking managers what information they would like to have. This is based on the assumption that managers know what information they need and want." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Misinformation Systems", 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)
"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)
"[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)
"The myth of efficiency lies in the assumption that the most efficient manager is ipso facto the most effective; actually the most efficient manager working on the wrong task will not be effective." (R Alec Mackenzie, "The Time Trap", 1972)
"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)
"The manager does not handle decisions one at a time; he juggles a host of them, dealing with each intermittently, all the while attempting to develop some integration among them." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work", 1973)
"The manager faces the real danger of becoming a major obstruction in the flow of decisions and information." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work, 1973)
"The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it." (Peter F Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", 1973)
"The prime occupational hazard of the manager is superficiality." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work", 1973)
"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)
"Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology. [...] The measure of innovation is the impact on the environment. [...] To manage innovation, a manager has to be at least literate with respect to the dynamics of innovation." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)
"[...] when a variety of tasks have all to be performed in cooperation, syncronization, 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)
"Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes." (Russell L Ackoff, "The future of operational research is past", 1979)
"Managers construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many objective features of their surroundings. When people act they unrandomize variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own constraints." (Karl E Weick, "Social Psychology of Organizing", 1979)
"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)
"The performance of profit center managers is [usually] measured over a moderate time span. The penalty for unsatisfactory absolute performance over the short-term is severe. The proper balance between known performance and potential future benefits is never clear." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)
"A competent manager can usually explain necessary planning changes in terms of specific facts which have contributed to the change. The existing fear, or attitude of failure, which results from missed completion dates should be replaced by a more constructive fear of failing to keep a plan updated." (Philip F Gehring Jr. & Udo W Pooch, "Advances in Computer Programming Management", 1980)
"The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager." (Peter F Drucker, "Management in Turbulent Times", 1980)
"Knowledge specialists may ascribe a degree of certainty to their models of the world that baffles and offends managers. Often the complexity of the world cannot be reduced to mathematical abstractions that make sense to a manager. Managers who expect complete, one-to-one correspondence between the real world and each element in a model are disappointed and skeptical." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)
"In management, there are few things as dangerous as a comprehensive, accurate answer to the wrong question. This is pseudo-knowledge. It easily misleads management into erroneous actions. Pseudo-knowledge has mushroomed with the advent of computers, which have made available masses of data that answer questions managers found too costly to ask before. In too many instances, however, the data are collected but not used because they answer irrelevant questions." (Dale E. Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)
"Knowledge-based organizations require managers to be problem-centered rather than territory-centered." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)
"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)
"Managing upward relies on informal relationships, timing, exploiting ambiguity, and implicit communication. And the irony of it all is that these most subtle skills must be learned and mastered by younger managers who not only lack education and directed experience in benign guerilla warfare but are further misguided by management myths which contribute to false expectations and a misleading perception of reality." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)
"At the core of every manager’s job is the requirement to make things happen toward a goal or consistent with a plan. Managers need to set goals and initiate actions to achieve them." (Richard Boyatzis, "Competent Manager", 1982)
"Coaching subordinates isn't an addition to a manager's job; it's an integral part of it." (George S Odiorne, "How Managers Make Things Happen", 1982)
"Managers are being confronted by a wider range of external pressures that must be taken into account in their major decisions [...] includ[ing] environmental protection, employment opportunities for minorities and all sorts of disadvantaged, shielding the consumer, and conforming to increasing government regulations." (Boris Yavitz & William H Newman, "Strategy in Action, 1982)
"One important function of strategy is to counteract a tendency of professional managers to become too conservative and bureaucratic." (Boris Yavitz & William H Newman, "Strategy in Action", 1982)
"Because the importance of training is so commonly underestimated, the manager who wants to make a dramatic improvement in organizational effectiveness without challenging the status quo will find a training program a good way to start." (Theodore Caplow, "Managing an Organization", 1983)
"Effective managers live in the present but concentrate on the future." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)
"If managers are careless about basic things telling the truth, respecting moral codes, proper professional conductwho can believe them on other issues?" (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 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)
"Leadership is a manager's ability to get subordinates to develop their capabilities by inspiring them to achieve." (John A Reinecke & William F Schoell, "Introduction to Business", 1983)
"Managers have an awareness that they are the direct representatives of the employees." (Takashi Ishihara, "Cherry Blossoms and Robotics", 1983)
"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)
"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)
"We try to make management decisions that, if everything goes right, will preclude future problems. But everything does not always go right, and managers therefore must be problem solvers as well as decision makers." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)
"By assuming sole responsibility for their departments, managers produce the very narrowness and self-interest they deplore in subordinates. When subordinates are relegated to their narrow specialties, they tend to promote their own practical interests, which then forces other subordinates into counter-advocacy. The manager is thereby thrust into the roles of arbitrator, judge, and referee. Not only do priorities become distorted, but decisions become loaded with win/lose dynamics. So, try as the manager might, decisions inevitably lead to disgruntlement and plotting for the next battle." (David L Bradford & Allan R Cohen, "Managing for Excellence", 1984)
"Most managers are reluctant to comment on ineffective or inappropriate interpersonal behavior. But these areas are often crucial for professional task success. This hesitancy is doubly felt when there is a poor relationship between the two. [...] Too few managers have any experience in how to confront others effectively; generally they can more easily give feedback on inadequate task performance than on issues dealing with another's personal style." (David L Bradford & Allan R Cohen, "Managing for Excellence", 1984)
"Most managers are rewarded if their unit operates efficiently and effectively. A highly creative unit, in contrast, might appear ineffective and uneven, and rather crazy to an outside or inside observer." (William G Dyer, "Strategies for Managing Change", 1984)
"One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people's excuses for failure." (Robert Townsend, "Further Up the Organization", 1984)
"It seems to me that we too often focus on the inside aspects of the job of management, failing to give proper attention to the requirement for a good manager to maintain those relationships between his organization and the environment in which it must operate which permits it to move ahead and get the job done." (Breene Kerr, Giants in Management, 1985)
"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 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)
"[In a crisis:] Resist the pressure to take premature action. Talk to your people individually to find the crisis heroes, the handful of managers who have a clear understanding of the situation, see it the way you do, and can deal with any ambiguity involved. After you find them, tell them what you expect and lean on them hard." (Gerald C Meyers, "When It Hits the Fan", 1986)
"[Management science techniques] have had little impact on areas of decision-making where the management problems do not lend themselves to explicit formulation, where there are ambiguous or overlapping criteria for action, and where the manager operates through intuition." (James L McKenney & Peter G W Keen, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)
"Managers who are skilled communicators may also be good at covering up real problems." (Chris Argyris, Harvard Business Review, 1986)
"Most managers, most of the time, treat the happenings of the past as if they were the permanent or given nature of things, rather than simply things that occurred in the past." (Kenneth and Linda Schatz, "Management By Influence" 1986)
"Operating managers should in no way ignore short-term performance imperatives [when implementing productivity improvement programs.] The pressures arise from many sources and must be dealt with. Moreover, unless managers know that the day-to-day job is under control and improvements are being made, they will not have the time, the perspective, the self-confidence, or the good working relationships that are essential for creative, realistic strategic thinking and decision making." (Robert H Schaefer, Harvard Business Review, 1986)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"[Computer and other technical managers] must become business managers or risk landing on the technological rubbish heap." (Jim Leeke, PC Week, 1987)
"How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act." (John Dearden, Harvard Business Review, 1987)
"Management: The definition that includes all the other definitions in this book and which, because of that, is the most general and least precise. Its concrete, people meaning - the board of directors and all executives with the power to make decisions - is no problem, except for the not-so-little matter of where to draw the line between managers who are part of 'the management' and managers who are not. (Robert Heller, "The Pocket Manager", 1987)
"Management skills are only part of what it takes. [...] Managers must also be corporate warriors or leaders. These unique individuals are the problem identifiers. They possess a strong sense of vision; view firefighting as an opportunity to do things differently and smarter; and are business strategists who help identify key corporate growth issues." (John W Aldridge, Management Review, December 1987)
"Managers exist to plan, direct and control the project. Part of the way they control is to listen to and weigh advice. Once a decision is made, that's the way things should proceed until a new decision is reached. Erosion of management decisions by [support] people who always 'know better' undermines managers' credibility and can bring a project to grief." (Philip W Metzger, "Managing Programming People", 1987)
"Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Most managers are not capable of making decisions involving complex technological matters without helplots of it. [...] The finest technical people on the job should have a dual role: doing technical work and advising management." (Philip W Metzger, "Managing Programming People", 1987)
"Most of us managers are prone to one failing: A tendency to manage people as though they were modular components." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"People in the corporate world play to a higher audience that equates action with results. The constant pressure is to demonstrate that you are a tough manager capable of making tough decisions." (Charles J Bodenstab, Inc. Magazine, 1987)
[...] quality assurance is the job of the managers responsible for the product. A separate group can't 'assure' much if the responsible managers have not done their jobs properly. [...] Managers should be held responsible for quality and not allowed to slough off part of their responsibility to a group whose name sounds right but which cannot be guaranteed quality if the responsible managers have not been able to do so." (Philip W. Metzger, "Managing Programming People", 1987)
"Setting and communicating the right expectations is the most important tool a manager has for imparting that elusive drive to the people he supervises." (Andrew S. Grove, "One-On-One With Andy Grove", 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)
"Telling a manager he's got to reach 25% growth isn't particularly relevant if his market isn't growing at all." (Ian A Cole, Business Week, 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 problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they’ve got more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage that way. They manage as though technology were their principal concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work rather than manage it. […] The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"The most successful managers are those that can quickly grasp how their bosses think." (Amy Bermar, PC Week, 1987)
"The way to get higher productivity is to train better managers and have fewer of them." (William Woodside, "Thriving on Chaos", 1987)
"When they [managers] can't manage because of too much oversight, it permeates the entire organization." (Frank C Carlucci, "Frank Carlucci on Management in Government", 1987)
"There's a burnout problem among programmers just as there is in any group. You can't expect a programmer to sit for weeks, months, years, doing the same type of programming, and not slack off. [...] Preventing stagnation is the manager's job. [...] Get them totally away from their current jobs." (Philip W Metzger, "Managing Programming People", 1987)
"To be effective, a manager must accept a decreasing degree of direct control." (Eric G Flamholtz & Yvonne Randal, "The Inner Game of Management", 1987)
"[Well-managed modern organizations] treat everyone as a source of creative input. What's most interesting is that they cannot be described as either democratically or autocratically managed. Their managers define the boundaries, and their people figure out the best way to do the job within those boundaries. The management style is an astonishing combination of direction and empowerment. They give up tight control in order to gain control over what counts: results." (Robert H Waterman, "The Renewal Factor", 1987)
"Rather than allowing them [subordinates] the autonomy to get involved and do the work in their own ways, what happens all too often is the manager wants the workers to do it the manager's way." (Edward L Deci, Nation's Business, 1988)
"Some people are excited about learning a new piece of software. Other people get very depressed. Good managers anticipate both situations they involve the persons to be affected in the process of selecting a particular program, and they provide time and resources for training. Training is the key in both cases." (Jonathan P Siegel, "Communications", 1988)
"The future prospects of management science will be much enhanced if (a) the diversity of issues confronting managers is accepted, (b) work on developing a rich variety of problem-solving methodologies is undertaken, and (c) we continually ask the question: 'What kind of issue can be managed with which sort of methodology?'." (Robert L Flood & Michael C Jackson, "Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention", 1991)
"A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management." (W Edwards Deming, "The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education", 1993)
"Pressure can also make managers act out of character. Degrees of panic will cause a normally good manager to lose self-confidence and focus. Under stress, even a good plan can be abandoned." (Wheeler L Baker, "Crisis Management: A Model for Managers", 1993)
"Industrial managers faced with a problem in production control invariably expect a solution to be devised that is simple and unidimensional. They seek the variable in the situation whose control will achieve control of the whole system: tons of throughput, for example. Business managers seek to do the same thing in controlling a company; they hope they have found the measure of the entire system when they say 'everything can be reduced to monetary terms'." (Stanford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)
"The trouble is that no manager can really handle the full-scale isomorph of his enterprise unless he is the only employee. To delegate is to embark on a series of one-many transformations. The manager can at best settle for a homomorph consisting of all the ones." (Stanford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)
"Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of 'events' that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)
"Managers are incurably susceptible to panacea peddlers. They are rooted in the belief that there are simple, if not simple-minded, solutions to even the most complex of problems. And they do not learn from bad experiences. Managers fail to diagnose the failures of the fads they adopt; they do not understand them. […] Those at the top feel obliged to pretend to omniscience, and therefore refuse to learn anything new even if the cost of doing so is success." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Lifetime Of Systems Thinking", Systems Thinker, 1999)
"The 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)
"The whole way of thinking focuses attention, for most, on the designed system, but it never proves sufficient, and they [the managers] have to 'get things done anyway', almost despite the system. What they are not encouraged to do, by this very way of thinking itself, is to pay attention to the detailed interactions between them, through which they "get things done." [This] is a thoroughly stressful daily experience for people." (Ralph D. Stacey et al, "Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?", 2000)
"Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management", 2006)
"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)
"The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management", 2006)
