three responsibilities of management: the performance of the institution for which managers work, making work productive and the worker achieving, and managing social impacts and social responsibilities. (Location 195)
business enterprise is a system of the highest order: a system the parts of which are human beings contributing voluntarily of their knowledge, skill, and dedication to a joint venture. (Location 231)
Organizations that exhibit a high spirit of performance are led by managers who are committed to doing the right thing and to getting the right things done. (Location 243)
managers will have to focus much more attention on making knowledge-work productive and knowledge-workers achieving. This requires attention to building on strengths and to increasing the productivity of knowledge workers, but also to integrating these specialists into a performing whole. This integration of specialists is becoming the very essence of management in knowledge societies. (Location 277)
The ethical rule that managers should live by when pursuing their organization’s mission is primum non nocere: “above all, not knowingly to do harm.” (Location 286)
Institutions are organs of society. As such, they are significantly dependent upon the welfare of society for their own welfare. (Location 301)
Management effectiveness requires three interconnected skills and practices, (Location 338)
Specific skills managers must acquire to be effective as leaders (Location 339)
Particular tasks that managers must perform (Location 340)
to lead their organizations to effectiveness Personal skills and practices that make individuals effective both in life and in managerial practice (Location 340)
managers must acquire skills in six areas: (Location 343)
Decision making People decisions Communications Budgeting Measurement and controls Information literacy (Location 344)
There are six steps of effective decision making and five characteristics of effective decisions. (Location 346)
It is much easier to fix a wrong solution to a problem if the problem has been defined correctly than it is to fix a “correct” solution to a problem that has been defined incorrectly. If a problem has been defined incorrectly, no solution to that problem can be found. (Location 347)
There are five steps in making effective people decisions: (Location 371)
Accept responsibility for any people decision you make, such as placement or promotion that fails. (Location 376)
Finally and most fundamentally, it is the manager’s responsibility to try to make the right people decision every time. (Location 379)
The five tasks of the manager are aimed at implementing the Theory of the Business. (Location 414)
Communication—upward, downward, and sideways—is essential to setting and accomplishing objectives. (Location 423)
It rests on a high concept of human motivation and behavior. It is the underpinning for a highly-spirited organization. (Location 427)
The organization’s structure should allow decisions to be made at the lowest level possible, consistent with minimizing the number of people that must be consulted to make each decision. (Location 431)
To ensure that efforts in the organization are directed toward objectives, a manager must establish yardsticks of performance. (Location 438)
Managers must also take responsibility for developing the abilities of subordinates and coworkers around them. This is a key result area for the manager. (Location 444)
the life expectancy of the employing institution has been going down, and is likely to keep going down. (Location 483)
Successfully managing a business meant being able to produce the same commodities everybody else produced but at lower cost. (Location 523)
“Generalists”—and this is what the traditional business enterprise, including the Japanese companies, tried to develop—are of limited use in a knowledge economy. In fact, they are productive only if they themselves become specialists in managing knowledge and knowledge workers. (Location 533)
There is as a consequence only one satisfactory definition of management, whether we talk of a business, a government agency, or a nonprofit organization: to make human resources productive. (Location 549)
They are what holds it together and makes it work. None of our institutions could function without managers. (Location 586)
management precedes and even outranks ownership. (Location 596)
When a variety of tasks all have to be performed in cooperation, synchronization, and communication, an organization needs managers and management. (Location 612)
Without the institution, there would be no management. But without management, there would be only a mob rather than an institution. (Location 625)
Organs, however, are never defined by what they do, let alone by how they do it. They are defined by their contribution. And it is management that enables the institution to contribute. (Location 627)
The emphasis is still on power and authority rather than on responsibility and contribution. (Location 674)
one can divide the work of a manager into planning, organizing, integrating, measuring, and developing people. (Location 677)
It would, therefore, seem appropriate to stress that the first criterion in identifying those people within an organization who have management responsibility is not command over people. It is responsibility for contribution. Function rather than power has to be the distinctive criterion and the organizing principle. (Location 694)
A manager, in the first place, sets objectives. He or she determines what the objectives should be. She determines what the goals in each area of objective should be. She decides what has to be done to reach these objectives. She makes the objectives effective by communicating them to the people whose performance is needed to attain them. (Location 718)
Second, a manager organizes. He or she analyses the activities, decisions, and relations needed. He classifies the work. He divides it into manageable activities and further divides the activities into manageable jobs. He groups these units and jobs into an organization structure. He or she selects people for the management of these units and for the jobs to be done. (Location 721)
Third, a manager motivates and communicates. He makes a team out of the people that are responsible for various jobs. He does that in his own relations to the people with whom he works. He does it through his “people decisions” on pay, placement, and promotion. And he does it through constant communication, to and from his subordinates, and to and from his superior, and to and from his colleagues. This is the manager’s integrating function. (Location 723)
The fourth basic element in the work of the manager is measurement. The manager establishes targets and yardsticks—and few factors are as important to the performance of the organization and of every person in it. (Location 727)
Fifth, and finally, a manager develops people, including himself or herself. This task, which in this age of knowledge takes on even greater importance, occupies an entire section in this book. (Location 731)
Organizing, too, requires analytical ability. For it demands the most economical use of scarce resources. (Location 737)
As long as measurements are abused as a tool of control, measuring will remain the weakest area in the manager’s performance. (Location 745)
Setting objectives, organizing, motivating and communicating, measuring, and developing people are formal, classifying categories. Only a manager’s experience can bring them to life and make them concrete and meaningful. (Location 746)
“Working” with the human being always means developing him or her. (Location 755)
developing people still requires a basic quality in the manager that cannot be created by supplying skills or by emphasizing the importance of the task. It requires integrity of character. (Location 763)
In every successful organization there are bosses who do not like people, who do not help them, and who do not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, they often teach and develop more people than anyone else. They command more respect than the most likable person ever could. They demand exacting workmanship of themselves and other people. They set high standards and expect that they will be lived up to. They consider only what is right and never who is right. And though often themselves persons of brilliance, they never rate intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character—no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter, even, how competent or brilliant—is a menace who is unfit to be a manager. (Location 765)
What a manager does can be analyzed systematically. What a manager has to be able to do can be learned. (Location 771)
The performance and the survival of the institution depend on the performance of management. (Location 777)
the ultimate test of management is performance. Achievement rather than knowledge remains, of necessity, both aim and proof. (Location 792)
Humanity can only adapt. It can, at best, optimize what the economy makes possible; at worst, it impedes the forces of the economy and wastes resources. (Location 830)
He saw in management, rather than in economic forces, the engine of economic and social development; (Location 845)
Responsibility for contribution, rather than rank or title or command over people, defines the manager. And integrity rather than genius is the manager’s basic requirement. (Location 920)
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change. (Location 936)
Management explains why, for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work. (Location 944)
They concluded that the assembly line was a short-term compromise. Despite its tremendous productivity, it was poor economics because of its inflexibility, poor use of human resources, even poor engineering. (Location 983)
Every one of these managerial innovations represented the application of knowledge to work—the substitution of system and information for guesswork, brawn, and toil. (Location 986)
Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures. (Location 1007)
Management—and not only in the business enterprise—has to be accountable for performance. (Location 1030)
Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. (Location 1050)
Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside. (Location 1063)
Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art: “liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it is practice and application. (Location 1073)
The hospital exists not for the sake of doctors and nurses, but for the sake of the patients whose one and only desire is to leave the hospital cured and never come back. The school exists not for the sake of teachers, but for the students. (Location 1160)
