Quotes & Sayings About Top Management

The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn't plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks. — Stan Goff

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

In almost any change there is 20 - 60 - 20. 20% are doing the change and we need to stay out of their way. 20% will never get there (a large percent still go into banks to see tellers vs. ATMs). 60% are in the middle. I think you will always find some companies where the head of HR is not a member of senior management team (bottom 20% and some companies where she or he has always been (top 20%). — Dave Ulrich

Some in management positions operate as if they are in a tree of monkeys. They make sure that everyone at the top of the tree looking down sees only smiles. But all too often, those at the bottom looking up see only asses. — Simon Sinek

I don't think I am very easy to work for because everything has to be just right or we don't put it out. But at the same time, all the people that work for me have a "no asshole" rule, if you're a jerk you're fired, so it's a great team and a lot of skillful people at the top of the game, anybody from management to the agents to the publicists to the day-to-day website stuff and it's just a great team. — Jeff Dunham

Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, or Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes. — Harry S. Truman

Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence. — Peter Drucker

The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management! — W. Edwards Deming

I basically see two reasons for a going public: Glencore gets access to more money. It is a way of funding your business and to finance growth. Plus: You have more liquid shares. It is easier to leave the company and redeem your shares. The 'going public' may also be an exit strategy for the top management. — Marc Rich

There's more than one mosque in the world that used to be a church and before that was a temple. Because it's a lot easier to just change the sign on the top and say under new management than it is to change the whole building. — Bill Maher

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution. — Peter Drucker

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships. — Peter F. Drucker

Make your top managers rich and they will make you rich. — Robert H. Johnson

I see companies these days where thoughts of "exits" are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded? — Brad Stone

Upper management placed bets that I would fail within the first few months. The fact is, I had no contacts, no extended family, I didn't know the city, and I didn't even speak the French language. Nevertheless, I was able to break everyone's expectations and become one of the top advisors at the firm year after year. I — Loay Ragheb

Ralph J. Cordiner, chairman of General Electric, expressed the attitude of top business management toward education this way: "Two of our most outstanding presidents, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Coffin, never had an opportunity to attend college. Although some of our present officers have doctor's degrees, twelve out of forty-one have no college degrees. We are interested in competency, not diplomas. — David J. Schwartz

I think that the best training a top manager can be engaged in is management by example. — Carlos Ghosn

You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing. — Paul Stanley

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace. — Douglas Conant

With proactive support and full engagement of top leaders, Change Management can become an enjoyable voyage to discover the new landscape of businesses. — Pearl Zhu

Top management is supposed to be a tree full of owls ... hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest. I'm still unpersuaded they even know where the forest is. — Robert Townsend

Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids. — Sarah Lacy

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs. — Gary Hamel

In reality, that was going to be very messy from an antitrust standpoint and meet a lot of resistance from the top management at Hasbro. That was a whole different story. — Harold L. Vogel

One of the big failures for the big auto companies is that even the CEO and the top management often don't understand design and manufacturing. As a CEO, you have to make decisions; you need to have knowledge. — Henrik Fisker

The Swedes have coined the term 'management by perkele' to portray the Finnish managerial approach. Instead of collectively pondering all the possible alternatives and letting every member of the staff from the cleaner to the MD voice their views, as the Swedes do, the Finns act swiftly and don't waste time on the decision-making process. If something isn't happening quickly enough, it is necessary for the top managers to slam their fists on the table and yell, 'Perkele!' Repeatedly, if necessary. — Tarja Moles

If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance. — Norman Ralph Augustine

'What about stress? Are you using your stress-management techniques when things seem to be getting on top of you?' 'Nothing is getting on top of me.' As I said it, a totally inappropriate picture popped into my mind. 'What are you feeling?' Jake's breath warm against my face, my bruised lips tingling from his kisses. 'Tell me what it feels like with me inside you.' — Josh Lanyon

What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it. — Peter Drucker

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

Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled "Me, who does the telling" and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled "Everyone else. — Terry Pratchett

Senior management approval and buy-in is essential to the success of the overall BCP effort. If possible, you should attempt to have the plan endorsed by the top executive in your business - the chief executive officer, chairman, president, or similar business leader. This move demonstrates the importance of the plan to the entire organization and showcases the business leader's commitment to business continuity. The signature of such an individual on the plan also gives it much greater weight and credibility in the eyes of other senior managers, who might otherwise brush it off as a necessary but trivial IT initiative. — James Michael Stewart

The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no 'charisma' and little use either for the term or what it signifies." Supporting Drucker's claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance. We — Susan Cain

Our top-down pyramid style of management is a very old concept borrowed from centuries of war and monarchies. — James Hunter

The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work. — Agha Hasan Abedi

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach. — Lee Iacocca

Top-down management is plan-based, hierarchical, and totalitarian. Bottom-up management is humane, consensual, and egalitarian. Effective — Philip Wik

Fifty years later, in the 1920s, the American DuPont Company independently set up a similar unit and called it a Developmental Department. This department gathers innovative ideas from all over the company, studies them, thinks them through, analyses them. Then it proposes to top management which ones should be tackled as major innovative projects. From the beginning, it brings to bear on the innovation all the resources needed: research, development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and so on. It is in charge until the new product or service has been on the market for a few years. — Peter F. Drucker

It is most important that top management be quality-minded. In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below. — Joseph M. Juran

In the Next Society's corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced. — Peter F. Drucker

Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas. — Jack Welch

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero. — Ann Coulter

important components of the management system. It is the process by which top management reviews the effectiveness of the system and analyzes the performance of the organization. — Craig Cochran

Collective management will build companies - not top-down decision-making. — Peter Diamandis

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers. — Donald Rumsfeld

In those same 10 years, women are getting more and more of the graduate degrees, more and more of the undergraduate degrees, and it's translating into more women in entry-level jobs, even more women in lower-level management. But there's absolutely been no progress at the top. You can't explain away 10 years. Ten years of no progress is no progress. — Sheryl Sandberg

The start-up life kept me busy and surfaced the problem of not being able to stay on top of my personal finances, which led me to invent Mint. I was working 80-hour weeks, and had done enough preliminary work and research to know I had a big idea: To make money management effortless and automated. — Aaron Patzer

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

In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. "I would love to help quality journalism," he later said. "We can't depend on bloggers for our news. — Walter Isaacson

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 tech industry - and, more specifically, Silicon Valley - continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards. — Kara Swisher

It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to - that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required. — W. Edwards Deming

Top management should spend 40 to 50 percent of its time educating and motivating its people ... — Buck Rodgers

The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage. — C. K. Prahalad

the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before. — Eric Ries

There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 per cent of our time ... The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20% of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 per cent more than now. — Richard Koch

I believe in the difference that a man or woman can make at the top of an organisation. Once you have a really good guy in place at the top, the next most important thing is continuity of management as opposed to a revolving door. — Anthony Pratt

Economist Peter Orszag witnessed the workings of vetocracy and its nefarious consequences. Writing in 2011, he reflected on what he had just witnessed as one of the top economic policymakers in the United States: "During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse - harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. . . . Radical as it sounds we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic. I know that such ideas carry risk. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: they come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way out of it. — Moises Naim

(Asked by John King about the political climate that existed in Washington at the time, and criticism of the Department of Justice under his management) Listen I don't expect an apology from men like Chuck Schumer, and I would put him and other individuals who were attacking me at the top of the list contributing to the low, low public perception of Congress, the integrity of Congress quite frankly. — Alberto Gonzales

When you are on top of your game you don't have to talk about it, the world will do that for you. — Dorethia Conner Kelly

I came up with this idea to create an app. And the premise of the app is this: every problem in the bar business goes away when there's sales. You increase revenue and you solve every problem. It's when the revenues are low that [the business] doesn't work. So I wanted to put together an app that focused on top-line revenue, guest experience, and business management in a more organized way. — Jon Taffer

Never inject a man into the top, if it can be avoided. In a big organization, to have to do that, I think, is a reflection on management, Of course there are always exceptional cases. — Alfred P. Sloan

Over the long haul, salespeople come and go, but having top-shelf management in place is the ultimate answer. — Jason Jordan

One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me. — William Clay Ford Jr.

Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions. — Warren G. Bennis

When the management iceberg is shaped like a huge phallus, you know that there are a lot of tossers that the top penguin has had to climb over to reach the tip and that there is no shortage of the same caliber of penguin in the balls and shaft of the corporation, just waiting for their chance to get a spurt to the top. Should I sugar coat this a little more? or tell it like it is? — Daniel Prokop

What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide. — W. Edwards Deming

The Philippines ranks among top off-shoring hubs in the world because of cost competitiveness and, more importantly, our highly trainable, English proficient, IT-enabled management and manpower. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

Nobody is ever ready for the top job, despite what they may say. As long as there is at least one management layer above you, you are shielded. The management takes the final decisions and carries the ultimate responsibility for those decisions. Once you are at the top, reality hits and you feel the umbilical cord being cut. Now the buck stops with you. I — S. Ramadorai