Organizational Behavior Quotes

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]

Teamwork was more accepted 40 years ago.

The other day, I noticed I'd arranged my spices in alphabetical order when I was on the phone, without even realizing, and when I was a kid I was constantly cleaning and organizing things - my toys, my sister's cosmetics.

The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.

Success comes only for those groups that overcome the all-too-human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them.

I think, in any workplace environment, the atmosphere trickles down from the top.

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

Humans want to know the hierarchy; it's important for there to be one leader.

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well.

I think corporations and people are very different. People make corporations whatever it is that they're going to be.

The most important rule of bureaucracy is never be wrong and alone.

Being a bureaucrat means never having to say you're sorry.

A lot of companies have nice-sounding cultural values like integrity, respect, and excellence, but if those values don't map to specific behaviors, then they quickly get lost. Instead, we see what's called a 'halo effect' where leaders tend to overvalue certain attributes and undervalue others.

Bureaucrats behave very differently than a private-sector manager because their motivations are different. Permanent bureaucrats, no matter how senior, worry about their next job.

Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent.

One of the main tasks of a manager is psychology.

You have to treat your employees like customers

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.

Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with physical output.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being paternalistic as a company.

Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.