Quotes & Sayings About Good And Bad Managers

I'm not a defender of old or new football managers. I believe in good ones and bad ones, those that achieve success and those that don't. — Jose Mourinho

Any good strategy involves risk. If you think your strategy is foolproof, the fool may well be you. Execution, too, is uncertain - what works in one company with one workforce may have different results elsewhere. Chance often plays a greater role than we think, or than successful managers usually like to admit. The link between inputs and outcomes is tenuous. Bad outcomes don't always mean that managers made mistakes; and good outcomes don't always mean they acted brilliantly. — Philip M. Rosenzweig

We only want to link up with people whom we like, admire, and trust ... We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person. — Warren Buffett

When you've been in the game as long as I have, you know the managers you've played for, the good ones and the bad ones. Even the good ones get fired. — Joe Torre

When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can't credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption. — Clayton M Christensen

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

I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street - why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now - because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure. — Michael Lewis

People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. The distribution of outcomes is enormously wide-but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones. — Eugene Fama

[Good managers] know that people have 'good' sides and 'bad' sides and that the secret of good management is in magnifying the former and toning down the latter. — Ha-Joon Chang

What is good customer service about then?

One word: caring.

Bad customer service happens when the employee doesn't care.

You could chalk it up to low wages or getting paid regardless of results. But that's not it either.

Hiring managers need to do two things and two things only:

1. Hire employees that ALREADY care and are ALREADY motivated.

2. Repeat step 1.

When this is done, everything changes.

People are happy on both sides of the table.

Costs for management and training plummet — Richie Norton

Bad ballplayers make good managers, not the other way around. All I can do is help them be as good as they are. — Earl Weaver

We call it the 'Rule of Crappy People'. Bad managers hire very, very bad employees, because they're threatened by anybody who is anywhere near as good as they are. — Marc Andreessen