Managerial Effectiveness Quotes

Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economiesーbut to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.

Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.

There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

I suppose people who graduate from very selective and expensive colleges, and receive immense reinforcement from colleagues who preceded them there, develop an inflated sense of their ability to effectively manage things, especially complex things. Many of these young, bright people cannot believe that our creaking and foundering systems won't yield to their managerial tinkering, and the net effect must be to turn them into very cynical careerists with nothing left but personal ladder-climbing and wealth accumulation... The political left in America makes up in cynical cowardly avarice for all the mendacious stupidity on the political right, so we end up at this moment in history with a perfect blend of every bad impulse in human nature and none of the virtues.

we have developed the following simple rules of thumb: Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.

It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always baseless fantasy. The a contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion - really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively. (page 143)

The third method of dealing with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That question is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one—including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons, and the Elders of Zion—really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively.

As the idea of culture has migrated from anthropology to organizational theory, so it has become highly instrumentalized and reified. It is another example of the hubris of managerialism, which claims to be able to analyse, predict and control the intangible, and with the result that it can bring about the opposite of what it intends. In other words, with the intention of ensuring that employees are more committed to their work and are more productive, repeated culture change programmes can have the effect of inducing cynicism or resistance in staff (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). With an insistence that staff align their values with those of the organization, what may result is gaming strategies on the part of staff to cover over what they really think and feel (Jackall, 2009).

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies--but to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it. Like Annie, they are faced with the choice between doing useful and important work like taking care of children but being effectively told that the gratification of helping others should be its own reward, and it's up to them to figure out how to pay their bills, or accepting pointless and degrading work that destroys their mind and body for no particular reason, other than a widespread feeling that if one does not engage in labor that destroys the mind and body, whether or not there is a reason to be doing it, one does not deserve to live.

Avoid Paternalism: do not do things for people that they can do for themselves."" They go on to explain five ways that we in North America sometimes act paternally. •Resource paternalism: believing that throwing money at global problems will solve them. •Spiritual paternalism: believing that since we are materially rich and they are economically poor, we must have the deeper walk with God. •Knowledge paternalism: believing that we are the teachers and they are the learners. •Labor paternalism: doing work for people that they could (and should) do for themselves. •Managerial paternalism: taking charge when things are not moving at a pace that satisfies us.9 For effective North American-global partnerships to exist, we need to revise our paradigms, or the ways we look at things. Several partnership-related paradigms needing revision stand out.

Cash flows from operating activities are the cash effects of revenue and expense transactions that are included in the income statement. 4 Cash flows from investing activities are the cash effects of purchasing and selling assets, such as land and buildings. Cash flows from financing activities are the cash effects of the owners investing in the company and creditors loaning money to the company and the repayment of either or both.

The deliverer of feedback experiences anxiety, which often is compensated for by insensitivity masquerading as directness. The receiver experiences hurt feelings, wounded pride, and defensiveness. More often than not, both parties try to hide their true emotions, and that in itself becomes a variable in the conversation that if not managed can get in the way of clarity and effectiveness. This may be contrary to human nature, but the most effective means of preventing this is to be open about how the conversation is making you feel rather than trying to hide the emotional truth beneath a veneer of managerial bluster.

Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? ....Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? ....Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us... ....those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents? - excerpts from Margaret Atwood's introduction (2007) to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.

Veblen’s overall evolutionary framework was one that stressed the cumulative and path-dependent nature of institutional change, the role of new technology in bringing about institutional change (by changing the underlying, habitual ways of living and thinking), and the predominantly “pecuniary” character of the existing set of American institutions (that is, expressing the “business” values of pecuniary success and individual gain by money making, to the virtual exclusion of all other values). For Veblen, as for other institutionalists, institutions were more than merely constraints on individual action, but embodied generally accepted ways of thinking and behaving, and worked to mold the preferences and values of individuals brought up under their sway. Within this framework, Veblen developed his analyses of “conspicuous consumption” and consumption norms; the effect of corporate finance on the ownership and control of firms; the role of intangible property and the ability to capitalize intangibles; business and financial strategies for profit making, salesmanship and advertising; the emergence of a specialist managerial class; business fluctuations; and many other topics (Veblen 1899; 1904).

For instance, research by Goleman and the Hay Group has found that within organizations, the most effective leaders were funny (that is, funny ha-ha, not funny strange). These leaders had their charges laughing three times more often than their managerial counterparts.

The novel predicted the triumphs of the post-1968 PMC: the moral rectitude of the virtuous lawyer and his high-spirited daughter renders the solution to racism attractive to the establishment—work on individual capacities for empathy and walking in another human being’s shoes; read books; have righteous feelings. To Kill a Mockingbird was an extraordinarily effective piece of Cold War anti-Communist propaganda: based on a liberal fantasy that antiracism is about good white people defending helpless black people against bad (poor) white people, it created an image of American liberalism that was a powerful tool for winning hearts and minds at home and around the world.

(a) A partner in a law firm, and a lawyer who individually or together with other lawyers possesses comparable managerial authority in a law firm, shall make reasonable efforts to ensure that the firm has in effect measures giving reasonable assurance that all lawyers in the firm conform to the Rules of Professional Conduct. (b) A lawyer having direct supervisory authority over another lawyer shall make reasonable efforts to ensure that the other lawyer conforms to the Rules of Professional Conduct. (c) A lawyer shall be responsible for another lawyer’s violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct if: (1) the lawyer orders or, with knowledge of the specific conduct, ratifies the conduct involved; or (2) the lawyer is a partner or has comparable managerial authority in the law firm in which the other lawyer practices, or has direct supervisory authority over the other lawyer, and knows of the conduct at a time when its consequences can be avoided or mitigated but fails to take reasonable remedial

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The United States has been co-opted into a “managed democracy.” The American republic was placed into the hands of oligarchs by bureaucratic imperatives and managerial principles and practices, which have created a creeping form of totalitarianism. Now we can clearly see the liberties and freedom guaranteed by the US Constitution being eroded rapidly just as Wolin predicted. The consequence is the establishment of this new form of totalitarianism, which (unlike classical totalitarianism) does not have an authoritarian leader. Instead, inverted totalitarian governments are run by a nontransparent group of managers and elites who manage the country from within. What President Trump might call the “deep state.” Or what Steve Bannon originally called the “Uniparty.” In effect, our democracy has been turned upside down while being captured by corporate interests that endorse authoritarian policies—hence “inverted totalitarianism

The managerial class easily crosses the public/private barrier that has been so effectively constructed in the American psyche.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us. Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?

But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out to destroy. When she claimed that entrepreneurs create things, while managers entomb them, it was immediately apparent that she was right, since the effects of the management culture lay all around us.

A good managerial record is more a function of which boat you get into rather than how effectively you row"1 Warren Buffett

These jobs are new—direct creations of meritocracy. Historically, the private sector did not value managerial and professional skills, and the state (which required such skills) faced effectively no private competition for elite labor. Into the early twentieth century, top civil servants were paid ten or even twenty times the median wage. And even at midcentury, elite government incomes remained roughly equivalent to their private-sector counterparts. In 1969, a congressperson was paid more than he might make as a lobbyist, a federal judge received perhaps half what he might have commanded at a law firm, and the secretary of the treasury was paid a salary that was smaller than but broadly comparable to what he might have made in finance. The best-educated and most skilled workers therefore naturally gravitated toward government or other public jobs (as when subsequent sons, deprived by primogeniture of inherited lands, joined the military or the clergy), simply because they had no better (or even credible) private alternatives. This kept regulators ahead of the people whom they regulated and helped the state effectively to govern even its richest subjects.

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies—but to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it. Like Annie, they are faced with the choice between doing useful and important work like taking care of children but being effectively told that the gratification of helping others should be its own reward, and it’s up to them to figure out how to pay their bills, or accepting pointless and degrading work that destroys their mind and body for no particular reason, other than a widespread feeling that if one does not engage in labor that destroys the mind and body, whether or not there is a reason to be doing it, one does not deserve to live.

the effective exercise of managerial skills dictates certain institutional requirements, among them strong and centralized authority, a hierarchical power structure, top-down control, and an aversion to whistle-blowers.

It's an important managerial rule to never ask a question of your directs if you don't intend to honor their answer.

We needed a greater sense of urgency.” So the management team decided that field managers would not be eligible for promotion unless their branch or group of branches matched or exceeded the company’s average scores. That’s a pretty radical idea when you think about it: giving customers, in effect, veto power over managerial pay raises and promotions. The rigorous implementation of this simple customer feedback system had a clear impact on business. As the survey scores rose, so did Enterprise’s growth relative to its competition. Taylor cites the linking of customer feedback to employee rewards as one of the most important reasons that Enterprise has continued to grow,

commonality of operational values, priorities, and preferences—how an organization works together—is a must if the progression in managerial style is to occur. Without that commonality, an organization can become easily confused and lose its sense of purpose. Accordingly, the responsibility for transmitting common values rests squarely with the supervisor. He is, after all, accountable for the output of the people who report to him; then, too, without a shared set of values a supervisor cannot effectively delegate.

government had degenerated into what has been called an ‘administrative’ or ‘managerial’ state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated regulation that had precisely the opposite effect of that intended.

these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.15