Quotes in management
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.
Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building?
It's always easier to apologize for something you've already done than to get approval for it in advance.
A good question for anybody in business to ask is What business are we in? To do well what we are doing-i.e., to turn out a good product, or good service, whatever it be? Yes, of course, but this is not enough. We must keep asking - What product or service would help our customers more? We must think about the future. What will we be making 5 years from now? 10 years from now?
Making it harder to make mistakes and making mistakes that are made more visible is good. Preventing them is even better.