If you treat people like chess pieces, don't be surprised if they show the initiative and creativity of chess pieces.

Kent Beck

If you treat your employees like mushrooms (keep them in the dark and regularly throw crap on them), it's entirely likely you will get precisely the work you deserve in return.

Seth Godin

Don’t tell me that X is important to your organisation. Show me the organisational attention and resources that are being invested to improve X.

Lorin Hochstein

Taiichi Ohno said 'Don't call it anything. If you call it something, managers will expect it to come in a box.' He was right.

John Seddon

Great companies don't hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.

Simon Sinek

I am not reporting things about people.
I am reporting things about practices.

W. Edwards Deming

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

W. Edwards Deming

If you've spent your working life in a command & control environment you'll assume there's no other way to manage. It then is logical for you to improve results by just being better at 'command and control'.

John Seddon

Managing by results only makes things worse.

W. Edwards Deming

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow worker not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

Peter F. Drucker

Plants don't close from poor workmanship, but from poor management.

W. Edwards Deming

Average companies give their people something to work on.
In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people something to work toward.

Simon Sinek

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Peter F. Drucker

People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system.

W. Edwards Deming

The fundamental task of management is 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.

Peter F. Drucker

The main difference between service and manufacturing is the service department doesn't know that they have a product.

W. Edwards Deming

In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work.

L. David Marquet

Managers must see themselves as experimenters who lead learning, not dictators who impose control.

Peter Scholtes

In healthy organizations, leaders take responsibility for the system and people take responsibility for their actions.
In unhealthy organizations, leaders blame the people and the people blame the system.

L. David Marquet

Een bedrijf dat brandbestrijding beloont, kweekt brandstichters.

Erik Weber

Training is a blunt and overly expensive instrument used to impact performance.

Harold D. Stolovitch

Managing an organisation by means of the monthly report is like trying to drive a car by watching the yellow line in the rear-view mirror.

Myron Tribus

An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Jack Welch

Don’t "fix" disengaged people.
Fix the environment where the people became disengaged.

L. David Marquet

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Russell Ackoff

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.

Peter F. Drucker

What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.

V.F. Ridgway

Companies are conditioned to reward the heroes who put out the fires, not the folks who keep a crisis from occurring in the first place. Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened.

Bruce McTague

The biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.

Tim McClure

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.

Tom Peters

If we value cooperation, why have we designed so many structures that reward people for competing more than cooperating?

Douglas McGregor

When making changes to organizations, managers often commit the error of being ‘architects’ without understanding the ‘plumbing’.

John Seddon

Unfortunately, measurement of productivity does not improve productivity.

W. Edwards Deming

The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.

W. Edwards Deming

Efficiency with people is ineffective. With people, fast is slow and slow is fast.

Stephen R. Covey

Het meeste van wat bestaat in het heelal - onze activiteit en alle andere krachten, middelen en ideeën - heeft weinig waarde en levert weinig op; aan de andere kant werken een paar dingen fantastisch goed en hebben een enorme impact.

Richard Koch

Smoothing the flow of work, organizing work and teams to reduce dependencies and handoffs, is management work.

Esther Derby

Managers must see themselves as experimenters who lead learning, not dictators who impose control.

Peter Scholtes

Alhoewel processen centraal staan in hun bedrijfsvoering, zijn de meeste managers zich hier niet van bewust, denken er nooit over na, meten ze nooit en gaan niet na of ze verbeterd kunnen worden.

Michael Hammer

The way organisations are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, create fundamental learning disabilities.

Peter Senge

Just because you can measure everything doesn't mean that you should.

W. Edwards Deming

There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.

Peter Drucker

Is doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Steve Jobs

Never push loyal people to the point where they do not give a damn.

Peter F. Drucker

Once employees base their motivation on extrinsic factors they are much less likely to take chances, question established policies and practices, or explore the territory that lies beyond the company vision as defined by management.

Chris Argyris

Command and control management was not invented in one moment of time, its development has been emergent. It is not so much a theory as a collection of ideas: ideas that solved problems at different points in time, ideas that have become norms.

John Seddon

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

C.N. Parkinson

95% of changes made by management today make no improvement.

Peter Scholtes

Managers think the numbers they look at constitute knowledge, they don't. They represent the score, they say nothing about the means. And acting on the score without knowledge of the means is the most common form of tampering.

John Seddon

Our 'normal' ideas about the design and management of work are seriously flawed.

John Seddon