Jacques Barzun Quotes

This implies that the laws governing organic cohesion, the organization leading from the part to the whole, represent a biological uncertainty, indeed an uncertainty of the first order.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

When I came here I thought I worked for the President. But I didn’t realize that I also worked for 534 other people at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who all think that they are presidents.

I believe being president of a private institution is a remarkable experience, but at Ohio State, it's a calling.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

I'm interested in institutions, particularly in the way institutions close ranks. They have hierarchies and their own ethics.

At the end of the day, you can change coaches and managers and players, but if there's something intrinsic, something wrong, then you have to look at what the common denominator is, and, usually, you've got to look at the ownership because everything runs from there.

It is of course true that many of our universities are large and complex organisations, requiring highly skilled individuals to run them effectively.

Google is so big you have no idea what a given person does.

To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.

Will somebody please tell me what they do with all the Vice-Presidents a bank has? Why the United States is the biggest business institution in the world, and they got only one Vice-President and nobody has ever found anything for him to do.

She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school.

You can look directly at the NFL and see how successful they've become because they have central control, central voice, and it doesn't mean that the owners don't have a say, but the commissioner runs it, and he's the one who speaks for them when they go out and do commercial deals.

Running a business is not the same as being president of the United States.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

Whilst the last members were signing it Doctr. Franklin looking towards the Presidents chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun.

In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.

Like any large organisation, public or private, the UN is a complex machine.

The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one

Here's good news: George W. Bush says that he is committed to fighting global warming. Yeah, well, he nipped that in the bud, didn't he? ... President Bush says he's really going to buckle down now and fight global warming. As a matter of fact, he announced today he's sending 20,000 troops to the sun

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

When you have two people challenge for the same job and you keep them both and call them co-CEOs, or the whole fiasco of a 'merger of equals'... there is no such a thing. So if there should be dreams of dual leadership, the chances of success are limited. But Bernie [Ecclestone] is still at the top of his game I have noticed.

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level