🖌️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)

🖌️Philip Kotler - Collected Quotes

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

"Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customers become better of." (Philip Kotler, "Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control", 1967)

"Marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain beneficial exchanges with target buyers for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives." (Philip Kotler, "Strategic Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control", 1993)

"Companies pay too much attention to the cost of doing something. They should worry more about the cost of not doing it." (Philip Kotler, "Marketing Insights from A to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know", 2003)

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

"Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behavior." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"Goals indicate what a business unit wants to achieve; strategy is a game plan for getting there. Every business must design a strategy for achieving its goals, consisting of a marketing strategy and a compatible technology strategy and sourcing strategy." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"Good mission statements have five major characteristics. (1) They focus on a limited number of goals. (2) They stress the company’s major policies and values. (3) They define the major competitive spheres within which the company will operate. (4) They take a long-term view. (5) They are as short, memorable, and meaningful as possible." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"Strategic planning happens within the context of the organization. A company’s organization consists of its structures, policies, and corporate culture, all of which can become dysfunctional in a rapidly changing business environment. Whereas managers can change structures and policies (though with difficulty), the company’s culture is very hard to change. Yet adapting the culture is often the key to successfully implementing a new strategy." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"To ensure they execute the right activities, marketers must prioritize strategic planning in three key areas: (1) managing the businesses as an investment portfolio, (2) assessing the market’s growth rate and the company’s position in that market, and (3) establishing a strategy. The company must develop a game plan for achieving each business’s long-run objectives." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

🖌️Robert S Kaplan - Collected Quotes

"A strategy is a set of hypotheses about cause and effect. The measurement system should make the relationships (hypotheses) among objectives (and measures) in the various perspectives explicit so that they can be managed and validated. The chain of cause and effect should pervade all four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"An organization's measurement system strongly affects the behavior of people both inside and outside the organization." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Mission statements should be inspirational. They should supply energy and motivation to the organization. But inspirational mission statements and slogans are not sufficient." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Organizational learning and growth come from three principal sources: people, systems, and organizational procedures."  (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Organizations need the capacity for double-loop learning. Double-loop learning occurs when managers question their underlying assumptions and reflect on whether the theory under which they were operating remains consistent with current evidence, observations, and experience. Of course, managers need feedback about whether their planned strategy is being executed according to plan-the single-loop learning process. But even more important, they need feedback about whether the planned strategy remains a viable and successful strategy-the double-loop learning process. Managers need information so that they can question whether the fundamental assumptions made when they launched the strategy are valid." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

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

"The Balanced Scorecard translates mission and strategy into objectives and measures, organized into four different perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. The scorecard provides a framework, a language, to communicate mission and strategy; it uses measurement to inform employees about the drivers of current and future success." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Organizations need tools for communicating both their strategy and the processes and systems that will help them implement that strategy. Strategy maps provide such a tool." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)

"Strategy maps put into focus the often-blurry line of sight between your corporate strategy and what your employees do every day -  significantly enhancing collaboration and coordination." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)

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

"The balanced scorecard measures your company’s performance from four perspectives - financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. A strategy map is a visual framework for the corporate objectives within those four areas." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)

"Effective leadership begins with having the right mindset; in particular, it begins with having an ownership mind-set. This means a willingness to put oneself in the shoes of a decision maker and think through all of the considerations that the decision maker must factor into his or her thinking and actions." (Robert S Kaplan, "What You're Really Meant To Do", 2013)

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

🖌️James L Hayes - Collected Quotes

"Effective managers live in the present but concentrate on the future." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)

"Endless meetings, sloppy communications, and red tape steal the entrepreneur's time." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)

"Good management and entrepreneurship are not synonymous." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)

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

"Many people equate good management with perfection. This is a fallacy. If perfection could be achieved, there would be no need for management." (James L Hayes, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 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)

🖌️Bruce Henderson - Collected Quotes

"All organizations do change when put under sufficient pressure. This pressure must be either external to the organization or the result of very strong leadership." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

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

"Concentrate your strength against your competitor's relative weakness." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"Executive stress is difficult to overstate when there is a conflict among policy restrictions, near-term performance, long-term good of the company, and personal survival." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"It is a paradox that the greater the decentralization, the greater the need for both leadership and explicit policies from the top management." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"It is rare for any organization to generate sufficient pressure internally to produce significant change in direction. Indeed, internal pressure is likely to be regarded as a form of dissatisfaction with the organization's leadership." (Bruce Henderson, 'Henderson on Corporate Strategy', 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)

"Power is the ability to initiate activity for others and to disregard others' initiative. Power can be used to strengthen power [...]. he first use of power is to preserve and compound it." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"The corporation without an explicit strategy will fall into the hands of politicians." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"The executive must choose between using his power to strengthen the organization and using his power to strengthen his personal power base." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

🖌️Herbert A Simon - Collected Quotes

"All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"As the decision-making function becomes more highly automated, corporate decision making will perhaps provide fewer outlets for creative drives than it now does." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"The mathematical and computing techniques for making programmed decisions replace man but they do not generally simulate him." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"Programs do not merely substitute brute force for human cunning. Increasingly, they imitate-and in some cases improve upon-human cunning." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole." (Herbert A Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106 (6), 1962)

"Design problems - generating or discovering alternatives - are complex largely because they involve two spaces, an action space and a state space, that generally have completely different structures. To find a design requires mapping the former of these on the latter. For many, if not most, design problems in the real world systematic algorithms are not known that guarantee solutions with reasonable amounts of computing effort. Design uses a wide range of heuristic devices - like means-end analysis, satisficing, and the other procedures that have been outlined - that have been found by experience to enhance the efficiency of search. Much remains to be learned about the nature and effectiveness of these devices." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)

"It is easy to construct conceptual abstractions - like those in the literature of economics and statistical decision theory - that describe decision making as a process of choosing among possible states of the world. Whatever their value for conceptualizing certain aspects of the theory of choice, these abstractions cannot be taken as descriptions of actual decision-making systems, since they ignore a central fact of the decision-making process: that it must be carried out by an information processing system whose computational powers are puny in comparison with the complexity of the environment with which they must cope. Factorization of that complexity by the device of selective attention is an indispensable adaptive mechanism." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert A Simon, "Computers, Communications and the Public Interest", 1971)