Marc Randolph Quotes

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

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sealed Management

Strategic Work is all about the big questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Tactical Work is all about answers: This is the system we use to do each task. This is how we do it, how we measure it, how we monitor it.

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.

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

There's a historical view that adding process into a scrappy start-up kills innovation, but I'm a firm believer that you need process at some point to remain agile.

Leaders of companies of any size, at any stage of development spend a lot of time focused on growing the business. We develop our game plan and ensure that we are optimally executing on our objectives. We concentrate on looking forward.

In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.

Management must manage!

Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.

I don't think I'd enjoy running a public company. We haven't needed to go to the market to fund expansion.

Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

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.

To measure is to know. If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system

You have to make your company idiot-proof because you may have an idiot running it some day.