Warren G. Harding Quotes

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

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

In many respects, we really are trying to not run the Social Office like a business, but we do have a strategy. We do have a mission. We are trying to standardize certain things so that our time is not spent on, you know, picking flowers or linens, that we've got standards.

If you don't understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.

This is a business that is much easier planned than executed.

To be a good manager, a manager tries to constantly fight to reduce waste.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.

I am trying to send directions out and keep control of state government for the final month.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

My view is that, as management, the focus has to be on having a strategy and executing it. As you do the strategy and execution, it is important to communicate it consistently.

The key to Operations at Wal-Mart is their ability to maintain the highest standards while at the same time getting things done with lockstep execution.

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

The most common way to grow a business is by overseeing each and every aspect of the company - the 'ground up' method.

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.