Organizational Flaws Quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Chernobyl happened in April of 1986. A few months earlier, in January 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. It did not have the impact on the environment and the amount of lives that Chernobyl did, but it was the result of the same exact problem: a failure of a lot of people and institutions over a long period of time.

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.

The NCAA is probably the most reprehensible organization God ever created.

Committees do harm merely by existing.

[Referring to the Pentagon:] It's a mammoth place that makes an incredible number of mistakes.

Where the U.N. is concerned, accountability is very thin on the ground in general.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at 'The Washington Post,' 'The New York Times,' and the three original TV networks.

As a rule, the civil-rights establishment is not punctual.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection.

Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

I've learned that, in many cases, people say, 'I want ground truth,' and they don't really mean it. There are warts all over this organization, as there are in many organizations, but you just have to tell truth to power and let the chips fall where they may.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.

It's through neglecting all other values to bring the customer the lowest price that Wal-Mart ended up with such a horrible sex discrimination problem, but that model produces lots and lots of other problems as well, which I think are possibly going to be more difficult to fix.

The remarkable thing about management is that a manager can go on for years making mistakes that nobody is aware of, which means that management can be a kind of a con job.