Kofi Annan Quotes

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.

If the United Nations Headquarters building lost 10 stories, no one would miss them.

Government and business are simple. It's only people that make them complicated.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

Structure is not about moving boxes around on a chart. Structure is about power.

The Secretary General of the United Nations is more of a secretary than a general.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

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 the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

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

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state

UN is made even more complex by the constant interplay of politics and bureaucracy and can certainly be bewildering for a novice.

All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.

There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible. And not a one of them is as good.

An organisation can only carry out its mandate if there is discipline, and where there is no discipline there can be no real progress

There is no way anything of value can be done without some framework. It might well be that the framework is discarded or the rules opposed; that is not important. What is essential is that they exist so that one knows when one is in opposition to them.