Management Quotations

If Peter Drucker is responsible for legitimizing the field of management and Tom Peters for popularizing it, then Charles Handy should be known as the person who gave it a philosophical elegance and eloquence that was missing from the field.
- Warren Bennis, leadership and management scholar and writer

It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive.
- Jim Collins leadership and management researcher and author, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Mission is at the heart of what you do as a team. Goals are merely steps to its achievement. Mission has an eternal quality. Goals are time bound and once achieved, are replaced by others.
- Patrick Dixon, futurist and business thinker, Building a Better Business - the key to management, marketing and motivation

The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.
- Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Villages are small and personal, and their inhabitants have names, characters, and personalities. What more appropriate concept on which to base our institutions of the future than the ancient social unit whose flexibility and strength substained human society through millenia?
- Charles Handy, leadership and management scholar

You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.
- Grace Hopper, quoted in "The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper" by Philip Schieber, OCLC Newsletter, No. 167 (March/April 1987)

MANAGEMENT: A class of semi-skilled corporate hirelings whose rise within the organization correlates directly with the amount of work they delegate to their more talented underlings.
- Rick Bayan, The Cynic's Dictionary

You can't manage knowledge – nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied.
- Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, Learning to Fly - Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations (2005), Chapter 2, pages 24-25.