Best Business Management Quotes & Sayings

I view it as a real competition. We're in a business where, you know what, there's no babies here. You go out, win the job and take it. I've been told by management, for the most part, that we're going to play the best people. Obviously, you've got to consider stuff like contracts - that's a reality of the game. But still, when it gets down to it, we're going to try and pick the guy that deserves to win the job. — Willie Randolph

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business — Charlie Munger

The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of co-operation it requires. Instead of a centralised bureaucracy, the model should be a market - not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments.
Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation.
Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business.
It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results.
No wonder socialists don't like it. — Margaret Thatcher

Inspirational leadership connects to a highly motivated workforce which, in turn, means inspirational results — Nigel Crouch

Many small businesses are doomed from day one, not from competition or the economy, but from the ignorance of their owners ... their destiny is already decided because they have no idea how a business should be operated. — William Manchee

Spend the most time with your best people ... Talent is the multiplier. THe more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time ... Persistence directed primarily toward your non-talents is self-destructive ... You will reprimand yourself, berate yourself, and put yourself through all manner of contortions in an attempt to achieve the impossible. — Marcus Buckingham

the title of our book lightly, either. Let Go To Grow is all about our vision of the future of business, its implications, and our best practices. It's about the future of your business too. We begin the book with some sobering marketplace realities and offer a set of management principles — Linda S. Sanford

Leaving wasn't a personal thing where I intentionally wanted to stick it to management or anyone. This is business. I felt I should have been rewarded for helping the Indians turn around a half century of losing. It was a shame they decided to treat me that way, after all I did for them. I helped this team go from one-hundred six losses to basically one-hundred six wins and into the World Series. And what do I get for it? Nothing. — Albert Belle

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. — Ronald Coase

The way in which we manage the business of getting and spending is closely tied to our personal philosophy of living. We begin to develop this philosophy long before we have our first dollar to spend; and unless we are thinking people, our attitude toward money management may continue through the years to be tinged with the ignorance and innocence of childhood. — Catherine Crook De Camp

Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same. — Robert Heller

Dave Stark has taken the best of recent marketplace management concepts and married them to timeless biblical principles of leadership, translating business jargon into ministry language. The combination is an encouraging and practical guide to Christ-centered ministry leadership. This book will be helpful to anyone involved in leading a church or serious about modeling servant leadership. — Jonathan Reckford

As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance? — Michael Porter

The least important person in a business is the most important person in a business. — Jennifer Ho-Dougatz

Good environmentalism is good economics — Barber Conable

This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can't wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, "Here's what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?" — Edward Lampert

Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure — Robert McNamara

There are some key elements to business being a success, and that's a smart visionary and great management behind the people that are going to build it. — Rob Dyrdek

Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing — Henry Mintzberg

In the UK what we've found is that even businesses which prided themselves already on their efficient management find that a really beady-eyed scrutiny of their resource management, with an eye to environmental best-practice and long term sustainability, produce fresh efficiency and fresh savings that actually shock those in the company — Margaret Beckett

It's not only how much money you make. It's what you do with it that determines your financial condition. — Sandra S. Simmons

A SWOT analysis involves asking, What are our strengths and weaknesses? What are our opportunities? What are the threats? — Amanda Lang

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management. — Edward Abbey

The American business man cannot consider his work done when he views the income balance in black at the end of an accounting period. It is necessary for him to trace the social incidence of the figures that appear in his statement and prove to the general public that his management has not only been profitable in the accounting sense but salutary in terms of popular benefits. — Colby Mitchell Chester

A product which is unceremoniously wasted to landfill at end of life surely can't be considered good design! — Neil Tierney

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me. — Ben Horowitz

Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. — Peter M. Senge

The best lessons I've been taught is that you should definitely have a plan. Try to imagine yourself six months in advance, and always save your money. Because there are always going to be unintended expenses that are going to come up. Surprises always happen. — K. Guillory

Companies like GE and Procter & Gamble have been in business for a long time. Over decades or a century you're bound to figure out a management structure that works. — Barry Diller

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs. — Russell Baker

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

Management creates an empowered state of mind in the organization by treating employees as part-owners of the business and expecting them to act like owners. — Leonard L. Berry

The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live — Vandana Shiva

Some people are natural inventors who prefer to work without the pressure and expectations of the later business phases. Others are ambitious and see innovation as a path toward senior management. Still others are particularly skilled at the management of running an established business, outsourcing, and bolstering efficiencies and wringing out cost reductions. People should be allowed to find the kinds of jobs that suit them best. — Eric Ries

Don't buy into the campaign that people don't like change. We are built for it. — Stacy Feiner

The connection between health and productivity at work is intuitively obvious but has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of either researchers or corporate financial officers. Ronald Kessler and Paul Stang help to bridge the usual gap between research and the marketplace with the help of a top-notch group of the best 'real-world' investigators obtainable-all in the cause of making the case that employee health should be treated as an investment in business performance-thus creating the new discipline of health and productivity management. — Sean Sullivan

People who have been there forever, left to their own devices, are rarely in the best position to design the future. It's those who consciously listen to the constituents of the future who can understand which direction to move in. — Crystal Kadakia

The overall organizational health needs to be measured via employee engagement, culture readiness, business agility, and customer-centricity, etc. — Pearl Zhu

We must recognize that "happy" is not a business goal. Service providers pursue "happy." Leaders pursue growth, competitive advantage, mission enhancement, and cost management. — Tina Nunno

Delegating your accountabilities is abdication — Michael E. Gerber

Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc. — Ellen Key

Instead of going back and looking at the question, people tinker with the solution, trying to make it fit."-Claude Legrande ... "The consequences of failing to do that [in our personal lives] are the same as those facing businesses - even more dire, perhaps, because what's being squandered isn't just the potential for profits. It's the potential for happiness. We miss opportunities to innovate and to make positive changes in our lives when we aren't willing to question ourselves. — Amanda Lang

With joint-stock corporations, investors can place bets on the success of many different companies, without having to play a central management role in any one of them. This allows investors to diversify their financial holdings. It also allows them to capture profits on their investments, without having to get involved in the dirty, troublesome business of actually running a company. — Jim Stanford

Management works in the system; leadership works on the system. — Stephen Covey

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. — Peter Drucker

It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only in the moment. — David Allen

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
[From the Preface] — C.S. Lewis

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers. — Clayton Christensen

IT has to provide both business and technological insight into how they bring success to the company as a whole transparently, holistically, and continually. — Pearl Zhu

I'm a binge writer. I work in the music business fulltime, in artist management and developing songwriters and recording artists, and so juggling my job I carve out as much time as I can on the weekends. — Ruta Sepetys

Premium will increasingly be defined in terms of sustainability and environmental compatibility — Norbert Reithofer

In every business, in every industry, management does matter. — Michael Eisner

A healthy corporate culture is built through proper man-management techniques put into action, which in turn aids in shaping a peacefully coherent work environment with healthy interactions capable of drawing out the maximum potential from the employed. — Henrietta Newton Martin

One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do. — Anita Roddick

We all know business financial performance improves when more women are in senior levels of management and leadership. — Beth Brooke

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong. — Peter Hargreaves

It is far better to have 10,000 Facebook friends who are in the same category or aligned with your values or a common inter- est than 100,000 random robot followers from around the world. — Brian E. Boyd Sr.

There are companies with management and companies with money. You can always find money. Management is the key to success in any business. — Husnu Ozyegin

Business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,
if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life. — Hortense Odlum

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job. — Andrew S. Grove