Participatory Management Quotes

If you don't allow people to contribute, to offer their point of view, or to criticize what has been put before them, then they can never like you. And you can never build that instrument of collective leadership.

The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'

I'm not their leader really. They don't do what I tell them. I do what they tell me.

Collective management will build companies - not top-down decision-making.

There's not democracy in the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the people who have to work with whatever it is we're working with have a say in how it's working.

I'm not going to ask for anything unless the workers want it. If they want it, they'll ask for it.

I'm a leader, not a dictator. I want to persuade people rather than threaten or control them.

Leading from behind doesn't work.

We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society...We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves.

Stakeholders - meaning workers and community - the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?

Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.

Major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action.

It's pretty much run by everybody. We're very involved in everything that goes on. We always have been.

We are a bottom-up culture, and we need a communications platform that can facilitate that.