Ineffective Management Quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Everything government touches turns to crap.

The CIA is an incompetent bureaucracy, generally.

Some people are in charge of pens who shouldn't be in charge of brooms.

The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

If you don't know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.

I never saw a bureaucracy produce a single barrel of oil.

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

If John McDonnell nationalised whole industries, they would be quickly taken over by bureaucrats more concerned about their careers than about customers. Except this time, there will be no choice and nowhere to turn when things go wrong.

First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

A sleepy master makes his servant a Lowt.

I'd reached the point at West Brom where I'd play well, score goals, set up goals and nothing would come from it. I'd go home, come back the next day and everything would be the same. No reward, no response.

Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

In the first place, bureaucracies never become efficient; they're never going to get rid of administrative costs; they're never going to reduce them. That's not the purpose of bureaucracies. It's to increase those things.

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle

The French are useless. They can't organize a piss-up in a brewery.

Looking at U.N. staff and budgetary rules and regulations, one might think some of them were designed to prevent, rather than enable, the effective delivery of our mandates. It benefits no one if it takes nine months to deploy a staff member to the field.

The worst way to fire somebody is to let it drag out. It's not good for that person because they're not succeeding in their role. And it's not good for the organization because it's just not working.

Homeland security is a problem. It's a good idea, but it's a problem because the man who runs it is Tom Ridge, and he is someone who has the leadership qualities of a gerbil.

I confess to a prejudice against officialism and a dread of bureaucracy.

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

Managers who don't lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don't manage don't know what's going on. It's a phony separation that people are making between the two.