Quotes in management

A relentless barrage of "why's" is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often!

Real benefits come when managers begin to understand the profound difference between "cost cutting" and "eliminating the causes of costs."

Managers must have the discipline not to keep pulling up the flowers to see if their roots are healthy.

If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organize, coordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense

There are four prongs of quality and four ways to improve quality of product and service:

- Innovation in product and service
- Innovation in process
- Improvement of existing product and service
- Improvement of existing process

The common mistake is the supposition that quality is ensured by No. 4, improvement of process, that operations going off without blemish on the factory floor, in the bank, in the hotel will ensure quality. Good operations are essential, yet they do not ensure quality. Quality is made in the boardroom.

A bank that failed last week may have had excellent operations— speed at the tellers’ windows with few mistakes; few mistakes in bank statements; likewise in the calculation of interest and of penalties and loans. The cause of failure at the bank was bad management, not operations.

My first move as the manager of the machine shop was to introduce standardized work.

Managers must see themselves as experimenters who lead learning, not dictators who impose control.

Good management is good management: it doesn't matter if someone figured out the good idea 100 years ago or last week.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.