Oliver E. Williamson Quotes

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.

If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.

When I wear the hat of management, it is important that our management behaves and conducts as management accountable to the board.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

In my opinion, the most important thing in governance is management control.

Management always has a big influence on your success, no matter how good or how bad the business is itself.

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they're helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent.

Business principles are only as good as the practices that back them up.

What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

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.

Management must manage!

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

The Secret Service today is awash in managers, not leaders.

When you're the CEO, you take responsibility.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

The goal isn't just to make transactions: it's to make better decisions in the way you run your business. If that's not at the top of every executive's priorities, then they shouldn't be an executive.

The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.