🖌️Andrew S Grove - Collected Quotes

"A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"As for cultural values, management has to develop and nurture the common set of values, objectives, and methods essential for the existence of trust. How do we do that? One way is by articulation, by spelling out these values, objectives, and methods. The other, even more important, way is by example. If our behavior at work will be regarded as in line with the values we profess, that fosters the development of a group culture." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"In effect, the lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. A rise in the latter will obviously lead you to do things to keep inventories from becoming too low." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Managerial productivity - that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked - can be increased in three ways: 1.  Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work. 2.  Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities. 3.  Shifting the mix of a manager’s activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Much confusion exists between what is strategy and what is tactics. Although the distinction is rarely of practical significance, here’s one that might be useful. As you formulate in words what you plan to do, the most abstract and general summary of those actions meaningful to you is your strategy. What you’ll do to implement the strategy is your tactics. Frequently, a strategy at one managerial level is the tactical concern of the next higher level." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. […] In sum, joint monitoring is likely to keep things in the optimum middle ground." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 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)

"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The first rule is that a measurement - any measurement - is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. […] If you do not systematically collect and maintain an archive of indicators, you will have to do an awful lot of quick research to get the information you need, and by the time you have it, the problem is likely to have gotten worse."(Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The number of possible indicators you can choose is virtually limitless, but for any set of them to be useful, you have to focus each indicator on a specific operational goal. […] Put another way, which five pieces of information would you want to look at each day, immediately upon arriving at your office?" (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] the output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under her supervision or under her influence. While the manager’s own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. Her organization does." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The role of the manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach. First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him. Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide. Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at one time. And having played the game well, he also understands it well."  (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"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)

"Your general planning process should consist of analogous thinking. Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand?" (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience [...] you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology." (Andrew S Grove, 1996)

"When the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, [existing management] must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity [...] unfettered by an emotional attachment to the past." (Andrew S Grove, 1996)

"[...] 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)

"Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don’t fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Altogether too often, people substitute opinions for facts and emotions for analysis." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more Successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Of course, you can’t spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Senior management needed to step in and make some very tough moves. [...] we also realized then that there must be a better way to formulate strategy. What we needed was a balanced interaction between the middle managers, with their deep knowledge but narrow focus, and senior management, whose larger perspective could set a context." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"The ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Selectivity - the determination to choose what we will attempt to get done and what we won't - is the only way out of the panic that excessive demands on our time can create." (Andrew S. Grove)

​​​​​​🖌️Jack Welch - Collected Quotes

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." (Jack Welch, Harvard Business Review, 1989)

"Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"Achieving work-life balance is a process. Getting it right is iterative. You get better at it with experience and observation, and eventually, after some time passes, you notice it’s not getting harder anymore. It’s just what you do." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"Forget the arduous, intellectualized number crunching and data grinding that gurus say you have to go through to get strategy right. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and hundred-plus-page reports. They’re time-consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?" (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"It sounds awful, but a crisis rarely ends without blood on the floor. That’s not easy or pleasant. But sadly, it is often necessary so the company can move forward again." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"An organization’​​​​​​s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."​​​​ (​​​​​​Jack Welch)

🖌️Warren G Bennis - Collected Quotes

"If we view organizations as adaptive, problem-solving structures, then inferences about effectiveness have to be made, not from static measures of output, but on the basis of the processes through which the organization approaches problems. In other words, no single measurement of organizational efficiency or satisfaction - no single time-slice of organizational performance can provide valid indicators of organizational health." (Warren G Bennis, "General Systems Yearbook", 1962)

"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)

"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)

"Leaders value learning and mastery, and so do people who work for leaders. Leaders make it clear that there is no failure, only mistakes that give us feedback and tell us what to do next." (Warren G Bennis, Training and Development Journal, 1984)

"Excellence is a better teacher than is mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do." (Warren Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Failing organizations are usually overmanaged and under-led." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

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

"Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989)

"Manage the dream: Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989) 

"Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989)

"With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization." (Warren G Bennis, "Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics, and Ecology", 1994)

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." (Warren G Bennis, "Managing People Is Like Herding Cat", 1999) 

"The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person." (Warren Bennis, "Managing People Is Like Herding Cat", 1999) 

🖌️Tim Brown - Collected Quotes

"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) 

"Although it can at times seem forbiddingly abstract, design thinking is embodied thinking - embodied in teams and projects, to be sure, but embodied in the physical spaces of innovation as well." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Although it might seem as though frittering away valuable time on sketches and models and simulations will slow work down, prototyping generates results faster." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Anything tangible that lets us explore an idea, evaluate it, and push it forward is a prototype." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound, and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Just as it can accelerate the pace of a project, prototyping allows the exploration of many ideas in parallel. Early prototypes should be fast, rough, and cheap. The greater the investment in an idea, the more committed one becomes to it. Overinvestment in a refined prototype has two undesirable consequences: First, a mediocre idea may go too far toward realization - or even, in the worst case, all the way. Second, the prototyping process itself creates the opportunity to discover new and better ideas at minimal cost." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as is necessary to generate useful feedback and drive an idea forward. The greater the complexity and expense, the more 'finished' it is likely to seem and the less likely its creators will be to profit from constructive feedback - or even to listen to it. The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea to learn about its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generation of more detailed, more refined prototypes. A prototype’s scope should be limited. The purpose of early prototypes might be to understand whether an idea has functional value." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototyping at work is giving form to an idea, allowing us to learn from it, evaluate it against others, and improve upon it." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototyping is always inspirational - not in the sense of a perfected artwork but just the opposite: because it inspires new ideas. Prototyping should start early in the life of a project, and we expect them to be numerous, quickly executed, and pretty ugly." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Since openness to experimentation is the lifeblood of any creative organization, prototyping - the willingness to go ahead and try something by building it - is the best evidence of experimentation." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"The project is the vehicle that carries an idea from concept to reality." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Traditionally, one of the problems with architectural design is that full-scale prototyping is virtually impossible because it is just too expensive." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"To be sure, prototyping new organizational structures is difficult. By their nature, they are suspended in webs of interconnectedness. No unit can be tinkered with without affecting other parts of the organization. Prototyping with peoples’ lives is also a delicate proposition because there is, rightly, less tolerance for error. But despite this complexity, some institutions have taken a designer’s approach to organizational change." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

🖌️Stephen Covey - Collected Quotes

"Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do)." (Stephen R Covey & Warren Bennis, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." (Stephen R Covey & Warren Bennis, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

"Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions." (Stephen R Covey & Warren Bennis, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

"We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or, as we are conditioned to see it." (Stephen R Covey & Warren Bennis, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

"In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life." (Stephen Covey, "Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People", 1994)

"Management is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right-brain activity. It's more of an art it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues. (Stephen Covey, "Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People", 1994)

"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)

"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)

"Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out." (Stephen Covey)

"Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall." (Stephen R Covey)

"Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system." (Stephen R. Covey)

🖌️C West Churchman - Collected Quotes

"Scientists whose work has no clear, practical implications would want to make their decisions considering such things as: the relative worth of (1) more observations, (2) greater scope of his conceptual model, (3) simplicity, (4) precision of language, (5) accuracy of the probability assignment." (C West Churchman, "Costs, Utilities, and Values", 1956)

"The concern of OR with finding an optimum decision, policy, or design is one of its essential characteristics. It does not seek merely to define a better solution to a problem than the one in use; it seeks the best solution. [...] [It] can be characterized as the application of scientific methods, techniques, and tools to problems involving the operations of systems so as to provide those in control of the operations with optimum solutions to the problems." (C. West Churchman, "Introduction to Operations Research", 1957)

"We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases." (C West Churchman, "Managerial acceptance of scientific recommendations", California Management Review Vol 7, 1964)

"A systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968) 

"For the scientist a model is also a way in which the human though processes can be amplified. This method often takes the form of models that can be programmed into computers. At no point, however, the scientist intend to loose control of the situation because off the computer does some of his thinking for him. The scientist controls the basic assumptions and the computer only derives some of the more complicated implications." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"How can we design improvement in large systems without understanding the whole system, and if the answer is that we cannot, how is it possible to understand the whole system?" (C West Churchman, "Challenge to Reason", 1968)

"In general, we can say that the larger the system becomes, the more the parts interact, the more difficult it is to understand environmental constraints, the more obscure becomes the problem of what resources should be made available, and deepest of all, the more difficult becomes the problem of the legitimate values of the system."  (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968) 

"The management of a system has to deal with the generation of the plans for the system, i. e., consideration of all of the things we have discussed, the overall goals, the environment, the utilization of resources and the components. The management sets the component goals, allocates the resources, and controls the system performance." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"The systems approach to problems does not mean that the most generally formulated problem must be solved in one research project. However desirable this may be, it is seldom possible to realize it in practice. In practice, parts of the total problem are usually solved in sequence. In many cases the total problem cannot be formulated in advance but the solution of one phase of it helps define the next phase." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"We are always obliged to think about the larger system. If we fail to do this, then our thinking becomes fallacious." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"When one is considering systems it's always wise to raise questions about the most obvious and simple assumptions." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"Operations research (OR) is the securing of improvement in social systems by means of scientific method." (C West Churchman, "Operations research as a profession", 1970)

"The comprehensiveness of OR’s aim is an example of a ‘systems’ approach, since ‘system’ implies an interconnected complex of functionally related components." (C West Churchman, "Introduction to Operations Research", 1957)

"The systems approach goes on to discovering that every world-view is terribly restricted." (C West Churchman, 1970)

"Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer." (C West Churchman, "The Design of Inquiring Systems", 1971)

"Knowledge is a potential for a certain type of action, by which we mean that the action would occur if certain tests were run. For example, a library plus its user has knowledge if a certain type of response will be evoked under a given set of stipulations." (C West Churchman, "The Design of Inquiring Systems", 1971)

"To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life. Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters." (C West Churchman, "The Design of Inquiring Systems", 1971)

"A system may actually exist as a natural aggregation of component parts found in Nature, or it may be a man-contrived aggregation – a way of looking at a problem which results from a deliberate decision to assume that a set of elements are related and constitute such a thing called ‘a system." (C West Churchman et al, "Thinking for Decisions Deduction Quantitative Methods", 1975)

🖌️Andrew S Grove - Collected Quotes

"Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output." (Andrew S. Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 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)

"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite." (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)

"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)

"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)

"[...] 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: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career", 1988)

🖌️Jay R Galbraith - Collected Quotes

"Organization design is conceived to be a decision process to bring about a coherence between the goals or purposes for which the organization exists, the patterns of division of labor and interunit coordination and the people who will do the work." (Jay R Galbraith, "Organization Design", 1972)

"The basic proposition is that the greater the uncertainty of the task, the greater the amount of information that has to be processed between decision-makers during the execution of the task. If the task is well understood prior to performing it much of the activity can be pre-planned. If it is not understood, then during the actual task execution more knowledge is acquired which leads to changes in resource allocations, schedules, and priorities." (Jay R Galbraith, "Organization Design", 1972)

"If the organization is faced with greater uncertainty due to technological change, higher performance standards due to increased competition, or diversifies its product line to reduce dependence, the amount of information processing is increased. The organization must adopt at least one of the four strategies when faced with greater uncertainty." (Jay R Galbraith, "Designing complex organizations", 1973)

"Organizations make two responses to deal with the behavior control problem. The first change involves the substitution of craft or professional training of the work force for the detailed centralized programming of the work processes." (Jay R Galbraith, "Designing complex organizations", 1973)

"[Task uncertainty is] the difference between the amount of information required to perform the task and the amount of information already possessed by the organisation." (Jay R Galbraith, "Designing complex organizations", 1973)

"There is no one best way to organize [...] Any way of organizing is not equally effective." (Jay R, Galbraith, "Designing complex organizations", 1973)

"If management can identify the negatives of its preferred option, the other policies around the star model can be designed to counter the negatives while achieving the positives. (Jay R Galbraith, "Designing organizations: an executive guide to strategy, structure, and process", 2002)

"Metrics help align individual behaviors and performance with the organizational goals." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"Organization design is the deliberate process of configuring structures, processes, reward systems, and people practices and policies to create an effective organization capable of achieving the business strategy." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"Organization design is the means for creating a community of collective effort that yields more than the sum of each individual’s efforts and results." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"Strategy is the cornerstone of the organization design process. If the strategy is not clear, or not agreed upon by the leadership team, there are no criteria on which to base other design decisions. Without knowing the goal, it is impossible to make rational choices along the way." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"The strategy determines what types of skills, competencies, and other capabilities are required of employees and managers." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

🖌️Douglas McGregor - Collected Quotes

"Above all, it is necessary to recognize that knowledge cannot be pumped into human beings the way grease is forced into a machine. The individual may learn; he is not taught." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"Behind every managerial decision or action are assumptions about human nature and human behavior." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"Classical organization theory suffers from 'ethnocentrism': It ignores the significance of the political, social, and economic milieu in shaping organizations and influencing managerial practice." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"Every managerial act rests on assumptions, generalizations, and hypotheses - that is to say, on theory. Our assumptions are frequently implicit, sometimes quite unconscious, often conflicting; nevertheless, they determine our predictions that if we do a, b will occur. Theory and practice are inseparable." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

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

"If there is a single assumption which pervades conventional organizational theory, it is that authority is the central, indispensable means of managerial control." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

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

"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)

"The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"The key question for top management is what are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?" (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

🖌️Alan Pennington - Collected Quotes

"At its most basic level trust can be described as acceptance of the truth of a statement without the need for evidence – clearly this happens over time: initially evidence is required that you will do as you say you will and then, over time, you accept that this will happen without the need for evidence on each occasion." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Data can be a scary subject for an organisation to come to terms with: it is often seen as confusing, steeped in mystery and only truly understood by a few highly technical experts." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Data from the customer interactions is the lifeblood for any organisation to view, understand and optimise the customer experience both remotely and on the front line! In the same way that customer experience experts understand that it’s the little things that count, it’s the small data that can make all the difference." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"[…] deliver a customer experience where the customer sees real value from how you use the data that they share with you and they will keep interacting/sharing that data and their consent for you to use it!" (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Evidence is freely available which demonstrates a gap between what the company thinks is important to customers and what customers actually deem to be the most important when it comes to making their choices. The failure to understand what is really important leads to customers receiving a sub-optimal experience and the company sub-optimising its commercial position." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Information or data is only valuable if it can be used to provide insights which then actually drive change. Sadly the most effort and expertise and applause is given to those who design and deliver incredibly complex statistical reviews of data over time – the beauty is in the complexity and the presentation not in the usability." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"It is not about deep data analysis to predict behaviour, it is about actively designing experiences and then applying data to enable the delivery. Cumulatively making lots of little changes using very specific pieces of data will aggregate to a bigger impact." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Remember that at the heart of the issue is that business leaders, often unintentionally, miscommunicate the goal – the challenge is how to articulate and describe what you are setting out to achieve and then to manage our human reaction to it." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Remember that for change to happen it has to be relevant at a local and individual level" (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"Remember the ultimate question you are answering is not how much data do you have, but who has it and how is it used?" (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

"The bad news is that companies tend to focus on three out of the four elements of the balanced scorecard and emphasis is skewed away from the customer component, which is the least understood and believed by many to be the least quantifiable." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

🖌️Joseph O’Connor - Collected Quotes

"A model is an edited, distorted and generalised copy of the original and therefore there can never be complete. A model is not in any sense ‘true’: it can be judged only by whether it works or doesn’t work. If it works, it allows another person to get the same class of results as the original person from whom the model was taken." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"All actions have a purpose. Our actions are not random; we are always trying to achieve something, although we may not be aware of what that is." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"An effective leader leaves a legacy; they leave their footprints on the road for others to follow. A good leader develops themselves and they develop others. They bring people together rather than divide them." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Authority alone is like pushing from behind. What automatic reaction do you have when pushed from behind? Resistance - unless you are travelling in that direction anyway and you experience the push as helpful. When you do not know what lies ahead and you are not sure whether you want to move forward, resistance is completely understandable. [...] Authority alone pushes. Leadership pulls, because it draws people towards a vision of the future that attracts them." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Authority works best where you have an accepted hierarchy [...]. Then people move together because of the strong implicit accepted values that everyone shares. If you are trying to lead people who do not share similar goals and values, then authority is not enough." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"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)

"Every time we push the boundary on the outside world we also push the boundary on our inner world. We open a larger ‘idea space’. Every advance in science, art and technology means we have gone beyond the limiting ideas that have stopped us advancing in the past." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Good leaders are ethical, responsible and effective. Ethical because leadership connects you to others through shared values. Responsible because leadership means self-development and not simply giving orders, however charismatically, to get others to do what you want. Effective because shared values and goals give the strongest motivation for getting tasks done. There are no guarantees, but this sort of leadership will bring you closer to people and give you the greatest chance of success." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Having a choice is better than not having a choice. Always try to have a map for yourself that gives you the widest and richest number of choices. Act always to increase choice. The more choices you have, the freer you are and the more influence you have." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Leadership comes from our natural striving to constantly reinvent ourselves. You do not need external permission to be a leader. Nor do you need any qualifications or position of authority. Leadership does not depend on what you do already. Many people in positions of authority are not leaders; they may have the title but not the substance. Others have the substance, but no title. Leadership comes from the reality of what you do and how you think, not from your title or nominal responsibilities. Leadership blooms when the soil and climate is right, but the seed comes from within." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Leadership has long been associated with authority - we tend to concentrate on the leader, to think of them as innately superior in some way, and take the followers for granted. But formal authority is only one possible part of leadership. Many leaders do not have it. In some cases, perhaps ‘companionship’ better describes the relationship between leader and followers." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Leadership is about inspiring people through a shared set of values." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Management keeps existing systems running smoothly. It is a skill; leadership more an identity issue. Leaders innovate, they change or modify existing procedures, and they focus on transformation. Leaders motivate people through their beliefs and values, pushing the edges of the current organizational culture; management accepts the current organizational culture and makes it work. Management gets people to do things and leaders get people to want to do things. Management works within boundaries and leaders work with boundaries (not without boundaries!) Managers are people who do things right. Leaders are people who do the right thing." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Managers sometimes justify the stick by pointing to better results, with the assumption that the threats caused the improvements. Alas, this is unlikely. One event coming before another does not automatically mean that the first is the cause of the second; the rooster does not make the sun rise every morning, although it may think it does. Bad results are much more likely to improve than get worse due to the simple law of statistics known as regression: results average out over time. Poor performance will eventually improve even when left to itself." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Managing [...] used to be about planning and control. Top management decided what was to be done, middle management worked out how to do it and everyone else did as they were told. This model assumed, of course, that top management knew what needed to be done, that the orders had time to percolate their way down and that, like a good army, the lower ranks would obey." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Neuro-Linguistic programming is the study of our subjective experience; how we create what passes for reality in our minds. [...] NLP also studies brilliance and quality - how outstanding individuals and organisations get their outstanding results." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"People respond to their experience, not to reality itself. We do not know what reality is. Our senses, beliefs, and past experience give us a map of the world from which to operate." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"The meaning of the communication is not simply what you intend, but also the response you get." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

🖌️James D Mooney - Collected Quotes

"Failure to delegate causes managers to be crushed and fail under the weight of accumulated duties that they do not know and have not learned to delegate." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"In every organization there must be some function that decides or determines the objective and the procedure necessary to its attainment [...] may be called the determinative [...] in secular government always known as the legislative." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"In organization it means the graduation of duties, not according to differentiated functions, for this involves another and distinct principle of organization, but simply according to degrees of authority and corresponding responsibility." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"It is sufficient here to observe that the supreme coordinating authority must be anterior to leadership in logical order, for it is this coordinating force which makes the organization. Leadership, on the other hand, always presupposes the organization. There can be no leader without something to lead." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

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

"No advance in human knowledge will ever exclude the leader's need for the counsel of elemental human wisdom, and especially of collective wisdom, in the making of all important decisions." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"Organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of a common purpose." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"The staff function in organization means the service of advice or counsel, as distinguished from the function of authority or command. This service has three phases, which appear in a clearly integrated relationship. These phases are the informative, the advisory, and the supervisory." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"The reason for the phenomenon we call organization is as fundamental as human life itself. It has its roots in the fact that man, in every fiber of his being, with the full force of every motive he has brought with him through the ages, is stamped indelibly as a social creature." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

"The supreme coordinating authority must rest somewhere and in some form in every organization, else there could be no such thing as organized." (James D Mooney, "Onward Industry!", 1931)

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

"Delegation means the conferring of a specified authority by a higher authority. In its essence it involves a dual responsibility. The one to whom responsibility is delegated becomes responsible to the superior for doing the job. but the superior remains responsible for getting the Job done. This principle of delegation is the center of all processes in formal organization. Delegation is inherent in the very nature of the relation between superior and subordinate. The moment the objective calls for the organized effort of more than one person, there is always leadership with its delegation of duties." (James D Mooney, "The Principles of Organization", 1947)

🖌️Dale E Zand - Collected Quotes

"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 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)

"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 pseudo-consultation. When he involves others in lengthy discussions of trivial problems, he is engaging in pseudo-participation. Most people recognize these ceremonies as a waste of time." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)

"One critical source of knowledge is an understanding of how your organization formulates policies." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)

🖌️James Surowiecki - Collected Quotes

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"[...] under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

🖌️Nir Eyal - Collected Quotes

"Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occuring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product, especially over a short period of time, increases the likelihood of forming new routines." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"To change behavior, products must ensure the user feels in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014) 

"User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014) 

"When designers intentionally trick users into inviting friends or blasting a message to their social networks, they may see some initial growth, but it comes at the expense of users' goodwill and trust. When people discover they've been duped, they vent their frustration and stop using the product." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)

"You'll often find that people's declared preferences - what they say they want - are far different from their revealed preferences - what they actually do." (Nir Eyal, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products", 2014)