Business Organization Quotes & Sayings

Time Progression: Wasting Spending Managing Investing — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy. — Karl E. Weick

Every organization should strive to achieve the 3 Rs of Business: Everyone doing the Right things, Doing them Right, and at the Right time. — Forrest Breyfogle

Attitude is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, money, circumstances, than failures and success, than what other people think, say, or do. It is more important than appearance, ability, or skill. It will make or break a business, a home, a friendship, an organization. The remarkable thing is I have a choice every day of what my attitude will be. I cannot change my past. I cannot change the actions of others. I cannot change the inevitable. The only thing I can change is attitude. Life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how I react to it. — Charles R. Swindoll

The single biggest challenge to any organization is the constant cloud of fear and doubt that swirls around the heads of the people involved. As a leader, your job is to hold fast to the big picture, to keep seeing in your mind's eye, with crystal clarity, where it is you're going - that place that right at this moment exists only in your mind's eye. And to keep seeing that, even when nobody else does.
Especially when nobody else does.
Your people count on you to do this. It's the biggest job you have. — Bob Burg And John David Mann

In many ways, the U.S. bureaucracy has moved away from the Weberian ideal of an energetic and efficient organization staffed by people chosen for their ability and technical knowledge. The system as a whole is less merit-based: rather than coming from top schools, 45 percent of recent new hires to the federal service are veterans, as mandated by Congress. And a number of surveys of the federal work force paint a depressing picture. According to the scholar Paul Light, "Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than mission, ensnared in careers that cannot compete with business and nonprofits, troubled by the lack of resources to do their jobs, dissatisfied with the rewards for a job well done and the lack of consequences for a job done poorly, and unwilling to trust their own organizations. — Anonymous

Today's businesses can't just use social media; they have to become social businesses, inside and out and from top to bottom. Ultimately, that is the goal of this book: to harness the power of being a social business to become the most highly recommended organization in your industry/category/niche. — Paul M. Rand

we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The — Edgar H Schein

When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around-bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.
Sam Spade — Dashiell Hammett

The corporate system is fully psychopathic, and any creative people who enter into business with any of these organizations come up against a lifetime of issues. You just deal with it as you go along. It'll keep on happening until people reorganize the organizations. — Kevin Shields

We're no longer a small business; we're a large organization spread around the world. I can't imagine Netscape growing as fast as it has if it weren't for the way we use our products. — Jim Barksdale

Yes. I'll accept being called a snob when it comes to government. I'd like very much to be left alone to manage my own affairs in a live-and-let-live economy, I'd like for my state to be left alone to keep house without advice from the NAACP, which knows next to nothing about its business and cares less. That organization has stirred up more trouble in the past five years - — Harper Lee

It's hard to get money to support your [non-profit] organization if you have no evidence. It's very much like the acting business: You need an agent and manager so you can get a job to get resources, but you can't get an agent and a manager unless people see your work. — Sonja Sohn

Microwork gives marginalized people a chance to earn a living by playing a vital role in the business processes of big companies. In parallel, the organization assists local entrepreneurs in running microwork centers, helping to grow a new pool of business talent across the developing world. — Leila Janah

The first thing about Houston is it's an organization run from a different perspective. In Cincy, the team lives off money it earns from football. Houston's owner has other business interests, and he controls the money. — Johnathan Joseph

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true. — James Surowiecki

I made the decision to end business relationships with the Trump Organization simply because it was the right thing to do. No one approached me, asked me or pressured me to take this action. — Randy Falco

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. — John Perkins

Unfortunately, to succeed in business, organizations need to make difficult choices all the time-what to do and, more important, what not to do. The truth of the matter is that whenever we make a difficult choice, some people will win and some will lose. The winners will be happy and the losers unhappy. It's impossible to make everybody happy all the time. If everybody in your organization is happy, that may be because you're failing to lead them. — Constantinos C. Markides

How engaged are your employees right now? You may consider such a question impossible to answer, but the truth is, you need to know this if you want a more profitable, ethical organization, as everyone must share the same values to make the changes genuine — Jim Craig

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more. — Laura Lang

An Incoherent Strategy When a company's value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti - a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as "low-high-low-low-high-low-high" - it signals that the company doesn't have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos. — W.Chan Kim

You have a wonderful organization. I understand you have ten thousand here. And if you count the ones in the various federal prisons, it brings your total membership up to around thirty thousand. — Will Rogers

A knowledgeable manager can lend to the success of an organization "almost" as much as a poorly trained manager can damage it. — Mark W. Boyer

If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision. — Peter F. Drucker

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. — Steve Blank

The organization likes to do their dirty business where no one can see it. — Julie Kagawa

My father has created an enormous business and he's created an enormous brand for himself, and I'm contributing to the business that he's built every day at The Trump Organization — Ivanka Trump

An organization with excellent internal communication will run smoothly, allowing its members to progress toward a mutual goal, which will ultimately affect the quality of external communication. — Scribendi

Talking things over has its place in an organization [but] so-called conferences are being grossly overdone. One executive stops at the desk of another to tell him, perhaps, about the wonderful score he made at golf on Saturday afternoon. This chin-chin immediately becomes a conference, and neither the office boy nor the telephone operator must disturb either gentleman. More idle gossip is indulged in at many business conferences these days than an old wives' sewing circle would be guilty of. — B.C. Forbes

Even an organization that doesn't do much work internationally will benefit from a culturally intelligent strategy to innovation. Working across different generations, business units, regions, and functions are all factors that can also influence the innovation process. — David Livermore

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

In an age where everything and everyone is linked through networks of glass and air, no one - no business, organization, government agency, country - is an island. We need to do right by all our stakeholders, and that's how you create value for shareholders. And one thing is for sure - no organization can succeed in a world that is failing. — Don Tapscott

Workplace culture is the heartbeat of an organization, and either yields energy and motivates people to pursue greatness or sucks the inspiration out of employees and slowly brings a business to a grinding halt. — Kevin E. Phillips

Let the business shape the organization, not the organization shape the business. — Richard Moran

Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance. Until very recently, they virtually ignored manufacturing. I think of lot of the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and now more recently the 2000s can be traced pretty directly to the biases of the business schools. — Charles R. Morris

I followed someone who had very large shoes. He had very large shoes. Mr. J. R. D. Tata. He was a legend in the Indian business community. He had been at the helm of the Tata organization for 50 years. You were almost starting to think he was going to be there forever. — Ratan Tata

If you keep looking at your business wishes as delusional dreams you will end up running just another one of them. If you get inspired by your business wishes then plan to find a way and people to make it happen, you will end up mastering a second to none organization. — Sameh Elsayed

Culture is the heartbeat of the organization and our society. — Pearl Zhu

When it comes to busines ... I mean your business. Always remember you are the leader of your businesnot the Manager. You are the inspiration of your organization, you are the core that moves your business forward ... and this is your added value as a business owner. — Sameh Elsayed

Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness ... If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial. — Richard M. Weaver

My final conclusion after 40 years or more in this business is that the unofficial policy of the World Health Organization and the unofficial policy of the Save the Children's Fund and almost all those organizations is one of murder and genocide. They want to make it appear as if they are saving these kids, but in actual fact they don't — Archie Kalokerinos

Nobody thought the direct business model would work. But work it did, and spectacularly. Until it didn't. And therein lies the tale. — Heather Simmons

No organization works if the toilets don't work, but I don't believe that finding solutions to business problems is my job. — James G. March

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization — Susan Jacoby

I like that combination between creativity and the creative process and the organization needed to make a business like this successful worldwide. — Bernard Arnault

Governments can can send inspectors to companies. Governments can put legal requirements in place to disclose information that consumers and workers and other interested people need. Non-governmental organizations don't have that legal power and to me, that's what imposes substantial limitiations on how far we can go with trying to keep corporations accountable though non-governmental measures. — Joel Bakan

A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives. — Peter Drucker

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things. — Theodore Levitt

A risk-taking environment starts at the top of a corporation. If the CEO doesn't have this spirit, chances are you won't find it anywhere else in the organization. — Mary Kay Ash

I take my personal upkeep real seriously; my sense of organization and attention to detail; my memory; my business - I love the business. — David Lee Roth

(It should be noted that the Honorable Guild of Evil Warlords has worked very hard to counter the negative stereotype of its members. After several dozen bake sales and charity auctions, someone suggested that they remove the word evil from the title of their organization. The suggestion was eventually rejected on account of Gurstak the Ruthless having just ordered a full box of embossed business cards.) The — Brandon Sanderson

In every case, you must ensure that the organization is really ready to have desired behaviors happen on day one and become business as usual. If you do that, you can feel confident that — Steve Jacobs

Information is a significant component of most organizations' competitive strategy either by the direct collection, management, and interpretation of business information or the retention of information for day-to-day business processing. Some of the more obvious results of IS failures include reputational damage, placing the organization at a competitive disadvantage, and contractual noncompliance. These impacts should not be underestimated. — Institute Of Internal Auditors

Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did. — Russell L. Ackoff

An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it. — Dee Hock

There is always a critical job to be done. There is a sales door to be opened, a credit line to be established, a new important employee to be found, or a business technique to be learned. The venture investor must always be on call to advise, to persuade, to dissuade, to encourage, but always to help build. Then venture capital becomes true creative capital - creating growth for the company and financial success for the investing organization — Georges Doriot

When a person travels through a few years with an organization, or with a partnership, or any other kind of working association, he leaves a 'wake' behind in these two areas, task and relationship: what did he accomplish and how did he deal with people? — Henry Cloud

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does. — Peter Drucker

Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It's about your organization winning business. — David Meerman Scott

In order to sustain the integrity of the organization, a business must dedicate time and resources to education, leadership development, and personnel development. Don't focus on the product. Focus on the team. — Robert Kiyosaki

My greatest reward is that I have been able to build this wonderful organization. — Walt Disney

If there are questions that are unanswered by research, they will be answered by a strategy division, a data-mining group or someone else within the organization. We need to be more effective at collaborating with these groups. — Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

I've learned that your intuition about things you don't know that much about isn't very good," Page said. "The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There's this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what's possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues. — Ashlee Vance

Perhaps the most distinguishing trait of visionary leaders is that they believe in a goal that benefits not only themselves, but others as well. It is such vision that attracts the psychic energy of other people, and makes them willing to work beyond the call of duty for the organization. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

To have a healthy and thriving business, there must be healthy relationships with the C.E.O.S. in the organization and I'm not referring to the Chief Executive Offficers. I am talking about the Customers, the Employees, the Owner (or stockholders), and the Suppliers. — James Hunter

In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations. — Richard Koch

We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization's success a reality. — Vern Dosch

But every company of the future is going to be in the business of exquisite care - which means quick turnaround time and convenience. To deliver exquisite care, you need an organization that coordinates well and listens well. — Fernando Flores

Culture is the organization's fingerprint. — Pearl Zhu

Every man owes a part of his time and money to the business or industry in which he is engaged. No man has the moral right to withhold his support from an organization that is striving to improve conditions within his sphere. — Theodore Roosevelt

Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others. — Nigel Cumberland

There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward. — Aaron Levie

Move away from the mid-set that the fulfillment of the organization's mission, vision, and strategic plan is only the work of leaders. — Sue Tetzlaff

Whereas many coaches left to others the minutiae of leading an organization, Walsh broke down the minute-to-minute progression of team practices, defined responsibilities for coaches and players, and set rules for how to handle business matters such as negotiating contracts and dealing with the media. He also dispensed with an authoritarian style of leadership and empowered individuals by teaching them to think independently. These innovations amounted to a comprehensive new approach to coaching, one adopted and refined by a generation of Walsh's successors. — Sydney Finkelstein

The manufacturing corporation, except in comparatively few instances, no longer represents a protecting care, a parental influence, over its operatives. It is too often a soulless organization; and its members forget that they are morally responsible for the souls and bodies, as well as for the wages, of those whose labor is the source of their wealth. — Harriet Hanson Robinson

Your leaders and staff are the face of your brand. Often they are the front line of your brand story. Their job is to show the world what your business stands for. Their posture, their attitude, and their influence trickle down through the organization and affect it. A good leader maps out the vision for the business. — Bernadette Jiwa

After all, your company doesn't define customer experience. Customers do. Customer experience is based on how your customers perceive your organization and how well you meet their needs when they interact with, hear about, and do business with your company. — Michael Hinshaw

There is an interplay between great leadership, events, trends, the organization, the people in it, the market 'out there' that goes far beyond one person exercising their will over others.

That's not what leadership is any more. — Phil Dourado

A business leader has to keep their organization focused on the mission. That sounds easy, but it can be tremendously challenging in today's competitive and ever-changing business environment. A leader also has to motivate potential partners to join. — Meg Whitman

At least since the time of In Search of Excellence in 1980, its first blockbuster bestseller, management literature has rejected the model of a business organization as a machine and its people as robots. Managers are exhorted to stop managing and start leading, to empower people, and to master something called "change management." The volume of the volumes has become cacophonous. However, many managers remain rather confused, as there is little consensus about how empowerment is actually supposed to work. — Stephen Bungay

All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent. — R. Buckminster Fuller

To be a Christian in business, then, means much more than just being honest or not sleeping with your coworkers. It even means more than personal evangelism or holding a Bible study at the office. Rather, it means thinking out the implications of the gospel worldview and God's purposes for your whole work life - and for the whole of the organization under your influence. — Timothy J. Keller

Truth be told, nobody thought Dell's direct business model would work, at least back in the early 90s. As Bill Sharpe, head of the advertising agency that held the Dell Canada account from 1996 to 2006, told me, "I had a business partner in California who said, we have a client, Dell. It sells computers over the phone, and ships them to you. I said, 'There's no way, who's gonna buy a computer over the phone? They're complicated. — Heather Simmons

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. — Steve Jobs

The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization. — Matthew Stewart

And no business can possibly equate happy workers (community) with profit (effectiveness). Happy workers are much more productive workers and hence contribute to profit, but no organization is formed for the idea of pleasing its employees. — Harvey Pekar

The strategic stimulus to economic development in Schumpeter's analysis is innovation, defined as the commercial or industrial application of something new
a new product, process or method of production, a new market or source of supply, a new form of commercial, business or financial organization. — Joseph A. Schumpeter

obvious, rather than rolling up numerous ad hoc spreadsheets, and an effective and broad system for data capture can save time and increase visibility into business performance. Without it, you must be very precise in the data you collect in order to avoid overburdening the organization or hitting material data-quality issues. However, don't let a broad reporting system allow you to neglect the process of effective reporting. A mass of data is not the same as a report. Even if executives can drill down into real-time portfolio information, that is too ad hoc to be a process for keeping projects on track, and you will still need a structure of reports — Simon Moore

IT - especially with its role so greatly enlarged by the arrival of the Internet - has changed not only how we work and conduct business, but also how we (and our customers) play, how we consume, and how we educate our next generations. And yet the IT phenomenon, so evident in the expenditures of every organization, has not yet achieved management attention equal to other areas, such as finance, marketing, operations, and human resources. In far too many companies, IT remains a black box that business managers rarely try to see inside. When business managers do engage in IT discussions, often they bring little expertise to bear. Few feel apologetic about their IT inadequacies. But the time is coming when "I'm not an IT person" will be no more adequate as a manager's defense in the aftermath of a major corporate problem than Jeff Skilling's now notorious "I'm not an accountant" - that CEOs effort to explain his failure to foresee or prevent Enron's spectacular implosion. — Robert D. Austin

One of the formulas to build a successful business is to nurture an "adaptability trait" in an organization's culture. — Pearl Zhu

To put it another way, I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs. — Dee Hock

Who was the greatest business man ever ... The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? ... It was Jesus ... Jesus was the founder of modern business ... he picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world! — Paul Harding

Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Thankfully, over time, I have come to realize those skills initially dismissed as "soft" - communicating a vision, providing feedback, or leading a team - are fundamental to everything we try to do in business. You don't create a successful, sustainable, and scalable organization unless you can engage the people within the organization to work together. The "best friend at work" from the — Morag Barrett

If the people in an organization think the company is small, they will act that way. If they think the company is big, they will act that way. — David J. Greer

Not only was [Edwin Land] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. — Steve Jobs

In business, organization is an absolute necessity, not an alternative. — Larry Burkett

Time Progression: Wasting >>Spending >> Managing >> Investing — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Nothing tells you more about an organization than the way it makes decisions. — Dennis Bakke