Malcolm Forbes Quotes

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

When I need things to happen, I need them to happen now, you know. I don't want to be having a meeting about a meeting about a meeting, which is what can happen in Britain.

We can get rid of red tape.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.

Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.

You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps. If the president of a company has a clean desk then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work.

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

Guidelines for bureaucrats: (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble.

It is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete.

Delegation of authority is a fact of modern life.

You can duck responsibility within your committee; you can blame somebody else's committee, you can disappear behind the facade of your party allegiance ..., or you can blame it on the other House; and if none of those happens to ... work, you can dump it on the shoulders of bureaucracy and red tape ...

The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.

The Civil Service rewards those who do no more than sit at their desks and say no.

Rather than the President telling someone to do something, I'll tell the guy. If he wants to find out something from somebody, I'll do it.

Bureaucracies cling to their office space, their secretaries [assistants], their official cars, and their every allotted dollar and personnel position with a tenacity that drowning men might well envy.

Communicating to the President through the State Department would be like making love through the mattress.

I never saw a bureaucracy produce a single barrel of oil.

The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder. Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never do enough to show their zeal. The result is...that having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.

If I have to tell a guy he's got something to do, I consider myself a failure as a manager.