Archive for Management
Be Quick But Don’t Hurry
“Be Quick But Don’t Hurry” — John Wooden’s top advice to his UCLA basketball team that won ten national championships in twelve years. Adds the coach: there is never enough time to be sure (and if you are sure, you’re probably too late), but you must always keep your balance. Wise words in any time, [...]
Steve Jobs and the Quality Yardstick
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. – Steve Jobs
What is The Place of Information?
In Terry Gilliam’s extraordinary movie, Brazil, protagonist Sam Lowry works in the government’s Information Storage department. Later, he accepts a promotion to the much more prestigious department of Information Retrieval. Businesspeople and citizens deal with information all the time. We have access to more than we could ever digest. Our critical task is to somehow [...]
Choose Individual Ingredients; Not the Name on the Package
On public radio this weekend, a financial industry expert mentioned two places where Lehman and other big-firm staff might end up: (1) in the offices of boutique firms that can get top financial expertise for a lot less money, and (2) in the offices of growing firms that want to harvest the wisdom of people [...]
Don’t Manage Like a Baseball Fan (Or a Politician)
Politics is like baseball. If your team loses, you remember who struck out in the ninth inning, not who struck out in the fourth. – Howard Fineman, on McCain and blame assignation for the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, in Bailout ushers in the era of Obama, MSNBC, 29 September 2008. I mention this not to [...]
Caring Before Knowing
Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. – unknown author? I saw this attributed to Teddy Roosevelt but that strikes me as so odd that I won’t repeat the credit. But I will at least repeat the phrase, which makes a lot of sense. Not long ago I met [...]
Trust Not, Want Not
Ronald Reagan often said “Trust. But verify” when negotiating with the Soviets. More cynically during the early 90s, I used to say “trust not, want not” after combining that Russian proverb with “waste not, want not.” Happily, I’ve lost my cynicism since then, but I still use the phrase as a reminder to never assume [...]
Ovid on Rest
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. – Ovid (43 BCE – 17 CE)
Actions Speak Louder Than Speeches
Great work doesn’t just spring from the minds of one or two creative people. It is produced by an entire organization that understands and encourages that greatness. Such environments cannot be created by fiat. They are built cumulatively by every manager in the organization, bit by bit, over time, by hundreds of thousands of events–every [...]
Work Expands…
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. – C. Northcote Parkinson, in Economist, 19 Nov 1955, quoted in Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations.
