Best Management Quotes

Handbook for Young Manager

PLANNING AHEAD

In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.
- Sir Osbert Sitwell

It's not enough to be busy. The question is: What are we busy about?
- Henry David Thoreau

Even if you are on the right track - you'll get run over if you just sit there.
- Arthur Godfrey

In New York, people are very overbooked.You say, "When do you want to have dinner?" It's May. They say, "What about October?" And then they complain: "Oh you can't believe how booked up I am."
- Fran Lebowitz

It is those who make the worst use of their time who most complain of its shortness.
- Jean de la Bruyere

GOAL SETTING

The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy; the pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time.
- Anonymous

While we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.
- Robert Ardrey

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
- Matsuo Basho, 16th century Japanese poet

The secret to success is constancy to purpose.
- Benjamin Disraeli

MAKING A MAJOR LIFE DECISION

One never rises so high as when one does not know where one is going.
- Oliver Cromwell

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
- John Dewey

Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.
- Arthur E. Morgan

Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.
- Washington Irving

MAINTAINING PERSISTENCE

There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
- Kin Hubbard

Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
- Sydney Harris

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
- Henry Ward Beecher

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.
- Christian Nestell Bovee

No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Success is getting up one more time than you fall down.
- Anonymous

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
- Don Marquis

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
-Anonymous

Hard work is often the easy work you did not do at the proper time.
- Bernard Meltzer

Never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.
- Mark Twain

Old procrastinators never die; they just keep putting it off.
-Anonymous

Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait...The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don't count.
- Robert Anthony

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.
- Benjamin Franklin

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
- Abraham Lincoln

Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible.
- George H. Lonmer

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
- Will Rogers

In delay there lies no plenty.
- William Shakespeare

DELEGATING

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
- Bertrand Russell

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
- Theodore Roosevelt

A good manager knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat. A great manager can convince the cat that it is necessary.
- Gene Perret

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they well surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George Patton

Good supervision is the art of getting average people to do superior work.
- Anonymous

In order for me to look good, everybody around me has to look good.
- Doris Drury - Chair, Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City, 1984

First and foremost as a manager or supervisor...your job is to get things done through other people...You are paid to manage, not perform every task.
- Mary Ann Allison, VP Citicorp, 1984

Hire the best. Pay them fairly. Communicate frequently. Provide challenges and rewards. Believe in them. Get out of their way---they'll knock your socks off.
- Mary Ann Allison in "Managing Up, Managing Down"

Delegation is giving people things to do. Management is accomplishing organizational goals by working through individuals and groups. It is easy to see that the two are closely entwined. And it is obvious that the manager who is not delegating is not managing.
- Robert Maddux

Never put off a task until tomorrow if you can delegate it today.
- Helen Reynolds

HANDLING WALK-IN VISITORS

According to a recent issue of Psychology Today, research shows that a slight protrusion of your tongue between your lips, while you're working, is taken as a tacit "Do Not Disturb" sign by most people. The next time you're trying to complete a file on an impossible task, you might want to try this technique.
- Canadian Lawyer magazine

The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.
- Josh Billings

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.
- James Russell Lowell

RUNNING MEETINGS

Perhaps Hell is nothing more than an enormous conference of those who, with little or nothing to say, take an eternity to say it.
- Dudley C. Stone

A good sign that either the meeting or some of the people are superfluous is when they try to get out of coming.
- Robert Heller

We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
- Benjamin Franklin

Hardly anyone writes because you can't really write down all you know. And even if you do write, nobody will read it. So there are meetings, and meetings about meetings, and meetings to plan reports, and meetings to review the status of reports. And what these meetings are about is people just trying to figure out what they are doing.
- Paul Strassmann, former Vice President, Xerox

When the result of a meeting is to schedule more meetings, it usually signals trouble.
- Kevin Murphy, Management writer

In order to speak short on any subject, think long.
- Hugh Henry Brackenridge

MASTERING TECHNOLOGY

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
- Jeff Raskin

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
- Sydney J. Harris

PROGRAM (pro'-gram) n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. v. To engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.
- Anonymous

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
- Erich Fromm

E-mail advocates love to push the benefits of direct communication. Managers send and receive messages on a one-to-one basis. Now that secretaries don't fix their sloppy writing, the whole world wonders how they passed English 1A.
- David Buerger

...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.
- Michael Hammer, Harvard Business Review, July, 1990

The workers of the world will soon be divided into two distinct groups. Those who will control computers and those who will be controlled by computers. It would be best for you to be in the former group.
- Lewis Eigen, 1961

PHONE EFFECTIVENESS

I have never been able to understand why it is that just because I am unintelligible nobody understands me.
- Milton Mayer

"Telephone: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance."
- Ambrose Bierce

TRAVELLING

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
- Mary Ellen Kelly

Modern man thinks he loses something-time- when he does not do things quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except to kill it.
- Eric Fromm

A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.
- Emile Ganst

Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.
- Al Boliska

To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.
- Fran Lebowitz

GETTING RID OF CLUTTER

For over a half century now I've watched office obesity develop into a full-blown, crippling disease. As our office clutter mounts, we're ever more intimidated and frustrated by it. We engineer drainage and removal of water and liquid wastes from society to prevent hazardous buildup, but the effluent that pours into our offices-paper-is never flushed out.
- Don Aslett

Sign on cluttered desk: A clean desk may show efficiency, neatness and organization, but very seldom provides a worthwhile surprise.
- Charles Averson

Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
- Dr. Wernher Von Braun

ACHIEVING BALANCE

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
- Elbert Hubbard

By all means, let us simplify the means of controlling time and the myriad details of our lives, but let us vigorously preserve our responsibility to direct our lives toward human accomplishment, rather than the pure accumulation of information.
- Paul Rice, Timesource

SAYING NO

I really cannot give you the formula for success. But I can give you the formula for failure. It's this: Try to please everyone.
- Bernard Meltzer

PUNCTUALITY

Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.
- Horace Mann

I could never think well of a man's intellectual or moral character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments.
- Nathaniel Emmons

If you're there before it's over, you're on time.
- James J. Walker

Punctuality is disappointing if no one is there to appreciate it.
- Anonymous

THE VALUE OF TIME

The Ignisecond, n.: The overlapping moment of time when the hand is locking the car door even as the brain is saying, "my keys are in there!"
- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
- Steven Wright

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
- Douglas Adams

In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.
- Andrew S. Grove - CEO Intel Corp

Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further we make it go.
- Josh Billings

Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.
- Robert Frost

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lost time is never found again.
- John H. Aughey

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.
- John Randolph

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nanosecond [n] The shortest possible measure of time, discovered recently in New York city. Generally speaking, it is the time between when the traffic light turns green and the guy behind you honks his horn.
- Anonymous