Organizational Management Quotes

Organizational structure and management style are those two factors that we always forget to analyze when the performance of our businesses goes down.

Not just the organizational structure but the management style can also affect your business goals of success and growth.

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

Instead of waiting for a leader you can believe in, try this: Become a leader you can believe in.

You can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.

The purpose of leadership is to change the world around you in the name of your values, so you can live those values more fully.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

When you’re a manager, you work for your company. When you’re a leader, your company works for you.

For businesses to survive, they will need to build organizational resilience for climate change, cyber, technology, and space as part of a broader existential risk management strategy.

Work/life balance is not about escaping work. It’s about living exactly the way you want to when you’re at work.

The first step to solving any problem is to accept one’s own accountability for creating it.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

To make a decision, all you need is authority. To make a good decision, you also need knowledge, experience, and insight.

True leaders live their values everywhere, not just in the workplace.

What first separates a leader from a normal human being? A leader knows who they are as a human being.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

no manager at any level can expect to succeed without the skill set of an organizational engineer.

Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.

The most important organizational resource is energy.

Change management is a broad term for the many ways of preparing, supporting, and helping businesses, teams, and organizations adapt to, thrive through and initiate change.

The first step out of the gate has to be knowing where you want to end up. What do you really want from your company?

When rewards come from an external source instead of an internal source, they’re unreliable, which means they’re dangerous if you grow to depend on them.

Values are deeply held personal beliefs that form your own priority code for living.

Values are the individual biases that allow you to decide which actions are true for you alone.

The worst thing in your own development as a leader is not to do it wrong. It’s to do it for the wrong reasons.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

company leaders need to provide their company with a self-organizing and semi-autonomous immune system. Effective risk management isn't about a siloed approach focusing on isolated threats. We have to think more broadly. Effective risk management requires a holistic approach that transcends a siloed focus on isolated threats. In today's interconnected business landscape, risks are rarely confined to a single department or function. Instead, they often ripple across the organization, impacting multiple areas simultaneously.

A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual & physical commitment combined.

Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer.

The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.

Your values are your essence: an undistorted mirror showing you at your pure, attractive best.

Careful now: even a financially rewarding, intellectually stimulating work environment isn’t the same as living your own values.

It’s impossible for a company to get what it wants most if managers have to make a choice between their own values and company priorities.

Success means: I want to know the work I do means something to somebody and helps make the world, if not a Better place, not a worse one.

Success for Managers means: I want to be in healthy relationships. I want a real connection with people I spend so much time with.

The myth of management is that your personal values are irrelevant or inappropriate at work.

Give today to get better tomorrow.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

Since the world around us is always changing, businesses that want continuity should be regularly shifting their paradigm.

A newly defined market will require either new capabilities or a new focus applied to current capabilities.

Everything the business does should revolve around providing value to the target market.

A target market should be like a lighthouse in a storm to a business

Business capabilities are relative to macro conditions. Based on differences in macro conditions, the economic worth of a capability could differ from one scenario to another.

When leaders in an organization have responsibility without authority, they're unable to direct progress and they're unable to achieve results. When we delegate responsibility, we need to delegate the appropriate authority to go along with that.

Even a single macro change – like an increase in the price of gasoline due to geo-political tensions – can have tremendous effects on a business’ ability to provide value to its customers.

A company can’t buy true emotional commitment from managers no matter how much it’s willing to spend; this is something too valuable to have a price tag. And yet a company can’t afford not to have it.

From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the — largely unconscious — embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management.

A capability is a business’ ability to provide value to customers. A business can only deliver the value it is capable of delivering, and capabilities are key enablers of a business’ ability to exchange value with its target market.

Once the target market is identified, it’s really about putting the business in a position to provide superior value in the most efficient way to that target market thereby enabling the business to earn maximum profit in the exchange.

Healthy organizations believe that performance management is almost exclusively about eliminating confusion. They realize that most of their employees want to succeed, and that the best way to allow them to do that is to give them clear direction, regular information about how they’re doing, and access to the coaching they need.

Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant.

Structure significantly influences behavior, thereby dramatically impacting results.

Management controls performance in people because it impacts skills; it’s a matter of monitoring, analyzing and directing.

Leadership creates performance in people because it impacts willingness; it’s a matter of modeling, inspiring, and reinforcing.

Any expert will tell you that if you want emotionally committed relationships then people must be allowed to be true to who they are.

Companies should be the best possible place to practice fulfillment, to live out values and to realize deep connectivity and purpose.

When you’re not on your own agenda, you’re prey to the agenda of others.

When you don’t know what true for you, everyone else has unusual influence.

Why live my personal values at work? This is an excellent question to ask. If your attorneys are planning an insanity defense.

This is your one and only precious life. Somebody’s going to decide how it’s going to be lived and that person had better be you.

Let’s get right on top of the bottom line: You must live your personal values at work.

There will be plenty of other problems in the future. This is as good a time as any to get ahead of them.

Try not to take this the wrong way, but your brain is smarter than you are.

Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.

You can stuff yourself with emotional fulfillment until it’s dribbling down your chin & your ego will quickly chomp it down and demand more.

The economy is in ruins! Bottom line? Good management will defeat a bad economy.

You don't have to fear your own company being perceived as human. You want it. People don't trust companies; they trust people.

Once individuals have the motivation to do something different, the whole world can begin to change. The

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

Every organizational system has its own natural “immune system” whose task it is to resist unfamiliar, and so unrecognizable, signals. That is not necessarily bad.

There is no check-box for ethical leadership. It is an ongoing individual and organizational journey. We will never know everything that there is to know.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

Being relevant to your customers only when you’re trying to sell something means choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time.

Here’s what you need to know most about leadership: Lead your own life first. The only thing in this world that will dependably happen from the top down is the digging of your grave.

1. Your Primary Aim 2. Your Strategic Objective 3. Your Organizational Strategy 4. Your Management Strategy 5. Your People Strategy 6. Your Marketing Strategy 7. Your Systems Strategy

Employees come to us in a state of readiness to engage, and it is the behavior and decisions of managers and organizational leaders that can result in even the best employees becoming disengaged over time.

The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.

The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organisational change management process that meets two key objectives, one being the company culture, and the other one is empowering its employees

At the heart of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team. While this can be a little threatening and uncomfortable at first, ultimately it becomes liberating for people who are tired of spending time and energy overthinking their actions and managing interpersonal politics at work.

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change.

Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.

Providing the ultimate solution to work/life balance: not escaping from work but living the way you want to at work.

What companies want most from their managers is what they most stop their managers from giving. What managers want most from their jobs is what they most stop themselves from getting.

Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes.

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode? Organizing

As for relegated/delegated responsibility to ensure organizational software licensing compliance, management is still accountable when intellectual property rights are violated. If the safeguarding responsibility is assigned to an ineffective and/or inefficient unit within an organization, IT audit should recommend an alternative arrangement after the risks are substantiated.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

On a cohesive team, leaders are not there simply to represent the departments that they lead and manage but rather to solve problems that stand in the way of achieving success for the whole organization. That means they’ll readily offer up their departments’ resources when it serves the greater good of the team, and they’ll take an active interest in the thematic goal regardless of how closely related it is to their functional area.

term Lean was coined by John Krafcik in a 1988 article based on his master’s thesis at MIT Sloan School of Management1 and then popularized in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking summarized Womack and Jones’s findings from studying how Toyota operates, an approach that was spearheaded by Taiichi Ohno, codified by Shigeo Shingo, and strongly influenced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Henry Ford, and U.S. grocery stores. Lean Thinking framed Toyota’s

If you think of capital allocation more broadly as resource allocation and include the deployment of human resources, you find again that Singleton had a highly differentiated approach. Specifically, he believed in an extreme form of organizational decentralization with a wafer-thin corporate staff at headquarters and operational responsibility and authority concentrated in the general managers of the business units. This was very different from the approach of his peers, who typically had elaborate headquarters staffs replete with vice presidents and MBAs.

I frequently detect a hint of satisfaction in the accounts that manage to excavate moral and individual responsibility from the historical debris. Perhaps it is because of the unspoken belief that changing the people will change the outcome. 'No Hitler, no Holocaust.' If only a few individuals had resolved that it was unconscionable to be a bystander, then perhaps thousands would have been saved. I suppose there is some solace in recovering a history in which altering an isolated event transforms all that follows. But personalizing the story in this way can obscure how these were not isolated individuals operating on their own but rather were people situated in an organizational and historical context that profoundly shaped how they looked upon the world, what they believed they could do, and what they wanted to do. The UN staff and diplomats in New York, in the main, were highly decent, hard-working, and honorable individuals who believed that they were acting properly when they decided not to try to put an end to genocide. It is this history that stays with me.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.