Don’t attribute to stupidity what can be explained by incentives.

Mike Elias

Learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

Peter Senge

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield.

Dwight D Eisenhower

Let’s stop pretending that elearning is just misunderstood by our clients or they don’t have time to learn. They do have time to learn – and they do so every time they face challenging situations in the context of their work.

David James

We've all experienced a need-to-know moment, made better or worse by how quickly we could put our hands on the right information or find the rigth person to ask.

Jay Cross

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

Peter Scholtes

A manager of people needs to understand that all are different. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management.

W. Edwards Deming

Delegation is not an effective way of exercising management by control. Participation becomes a farce when it is applied as a sales gimmick for kidding people into thinking they are important.

Douglas McGregor

The essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

Peter Drucker

The secret of your organization success is determined by your team daily management.

Lean Institute Asia

A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together.

W. Edwards Deming

An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.

Stephen R. Covey

Organizational success is fundamentally determined by how well people actually end up performing the day-to-day work of the organization.

Conrad Gottfredson

Successful management consultants are ones who support managers' unsupportable beliefs.

Russell Ackoff

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

Peter R. Scholtes

Without data, opinion prevails. Where opinion prevails, whoever has power is the king.

Peter Scholtes

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

When I ask people ‘what’s the problem with command and control?’ they usually focus on the ‘command’ word – bosses are too bossy – so we need ‘servant leaders’, leaders as ‘coaches’ and the like. But actually the problem is the ‘control’ word.

John Seddon

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

Peter Scholtes

You can't improve management. You have to leave the present paradigm behind.

Jos de Blok

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Tom Peters

If you could reliably and easily measure and reward individual contributions, you probably would not need an organization at all as everyone would enter markets solely as individuals.

Herbert Simon

The thing that many organizations miss is that principles are not practices. If you copy practices, it won't work very well ... no organization copying practices is going to be successful; they have to develop their own way, based on application of principles.

Barry O'Reilly

As soon as you introduce controls on human behaviour, you lose the game.

John Seddon

The failure to use measures of the right sort and in the right way is probably the biggest single cause of dysfunction in our organisations.

Hermanni Hyytiälä

The problem of people not working together won’t be solved by interventions such as team-working, participation, empowerment programmes and the like, for one simple reason: it is the system that governs behaviour.

John Seddon

Veel managementideeën zijn gewoon bullshit. Strategie is langetermijn-bullshit en activity-based costing is hele precieze bullshit. Maar bullshit blijft het.

Eliyahu Goldratt

I’d rather have first-rate execution and second-rate strategy than a brilliant idea and mediocre management.

Jamie Dimon

Strategies most often fail because they aren’t well executed.

Larry Bossidy

Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed.

Edgar H. Schein

All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission.

Edgar H. Schein

Building an effective organization is ultimately a matter of meshing the different subcultures by encouraging the evolution of common goals, common language, and common procedures for solving problems.

Edgar H. Schein

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconstancy. The signature of greatness is a disciplined and consistent focus on the right things.

Jim Collins

It is the process of valuestreammapping mapping rather than the maps themselves that carries the greatest power by instilling transformational mindsets and behaviors into an organization.

Karen Martin & Mike Osterling

VSM reflects work flow as a customer experiences it versus the internal focus of process-level maps. Many companies are structured as a series of function based silos that bear little relationship to the customer.

Karen Martin Mike Osterling

Valuestreammapping is the most powerful organizational tool we have seen to date. Once you think in vsm terms, it is difficult to look at work in any other way.

Karin Martin & Mike Osterling

Stubborn on the vision, flexible on the details.

Jeff Bezos

The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills. Everything else will become obsolete over time.

Peter F. Drucker

Building an effective organization is ultimately a matter of meshing the different subcultures by encouraging the evolution of common goals, common language, and common procedures for solving problems.

Edgar Schein

Performance can’t be managed. You can sow the seeds and nurture the soil, but you can’t make a flower grow by pulling on it.

Bjarte Bogsnes

I'm slowly becoming a convert to the principe that you can't motivate people to do things, you can only demotivate them. The primary job of the manager is not to empower but to remove obstacles.

Scott Adams

When I ask people ‘what’s the problem with command and control?’ they usually focus on the ‘command’ word – bosses are too bossy – so we need ‘servant leaders’, leaders as ‘coaches’ and the like. But actually the problem is the ‘control’ word.

John Seddon

Organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Indvidual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organizational learning occurs.

Peter Senge

In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. That is, they are responsible for learning.

Peter Senge

Hierarchies implicitly and explicitly devalue the people who are actually doing the work to produce products and deliver services.

Esther Derby

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

It's poorly designed systems, not incompetent or unmotivated individuals, that cause most organszational problems.

Peter Senge

The behaviour we see today in organisations isn't consequence of human nature; it's consequence of the way we organise and manage people.

Douglas McGregor

When I ask people ‘what’s the problem with command and control?’ they usually focus on the ‘command’ word – bosses are too bossy – so we need ‘servant leaders’, leaders as ‘coaches’ and the like. But actually the problem is the ‘control’ word.

John Seddon