Alvin Toffler Quotes

We'll always have bureaucracies, but bureaucracies led by bureaucrats might be too much of a bad thing.

You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs.

Too many talk about a company's leadership, referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that: senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.

A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.

In China, you have to have a strong leader for a business to get anything done.

Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

Administrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being

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

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

There is little incentive for initiative just now: the [State] Department seems to take no interest; we never receive comments on our work and many of our questions go unanswered.

It is a huge bureaucracy. It is so inept. But it does function.

I want you to cut through red tape. I want you to cut through bureaucracy. There is no excuse for inaction at this point.

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.

There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept..

In government, you're not a writer, you're an administrator.

Some people need a command-and-control environment.

Eric Schmidt from Google is one of my favorite mentors. And Eric would always say this very humbling thing that's really true, which is, he would say, 'Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.'

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.

NASA, like every government organization, has some bureaucracy, which can become slimmer.