. . . top management should spend 40 to 50 percent of its time educating and motivating its people. . .
It is most important that top management be quality-minded. In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below.
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.
Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to - that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.
I basically see two reasons for a going public: Glencore gets access to more money. It is a way of funding your business and to finance growth. Plus: You have more liquid shares. It is easier to leave the company and redeem your shares. The 'going public' may also be an exit strategy for the top management.
The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage.
Real management is developing people through work.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
When you don't know what you're doing, fake it.
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
In reality, that was going to be very messy from an antitrust standpoint and meet a lot of resistance from the top management at Hasbro. That was a whole different story.
You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.
The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.
The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach.
In life and business, there are two cardinal sins, the first is to act precipitously without thought, and the second is to not act at all. Unfortunately the board of directors and top management of Times Warner already committed the first sin by merging with AOL, and we believe they are currently in the process of committing the second; now is not a time to move slowly and suffer the paralysis of inaction.
