Quotes in management

Quality, productivity, and innovation can be significantly increased if companies provide all employees with practical tools for exploiting potential information.

If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.

Systems are created, sustained, and improved by insightful and interactive work on the system, not by using carrots and sticks. Measurable goals do not improve systems; accountability does not improve systems. Improving systems improves systems.

A tightrope over a chasm is fine for a trained acrobat with a balancing pole. It is foolish for someone without the right training or tools. They would be better served with something else - a rope bridge with railings.

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

The best is the enemy of the good.

A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates.

Your purpose is to identify where in the process things go wrong, not who messed up. Look for systemic causes, not culprits.

Best efforts are essential. Unfortunately, best efforts, people charging this way and that way without guidance of principles, can do a lot of damage.

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.