Top Down Management Quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

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

You do not need 435 people playing commander-in-chief.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

A manager can never accept somebody at the top influencing his decisions about the team.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.

In China, you have to have a strong leader for a business to get anything done.

The fish rots from the head.

The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.

Vince McMahon - he's third generation, and his enormous empire, he ran it much like the territories. The buck stopped with him; he made the decisions. That's how a company should be run. Feast or famine, right or wrong, the WWE is driven off his decision making and always has been.

The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.

George W. Bush’s idea of leadership is, “I lead; you follow.”

In this day and age, a big economy – a modern economy – just cannot be managed from the top.

Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.

As dutiful bishops soon discover, authoritarianism, or control from the top down, characterizes the hierarchical tradition.

Some people need a command-and-control environment.

I don't like to rule by committee. I like sort of an autocratic way of dealing with things.

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

The Home Office culture was one of being just above the problem, of hovering just out of reach of knowing what was going on on the ground, whether it was crime or immigration.

The model a lot of companies use is a very pyramidal model which sort of designates that all creativity, all wisdom flows from the top. We think that's the absolute wrong model.

That the more authoritarian organizations survive and prevail goes generally unnoticed because people focus on the objectives of organizations, which are many and varied, rather than on their structures, which lend to be similar.

Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.

Corporations, by their nature, do not function as democratic organizations.

Bureaucracy is widespread in the unemployed movement.... There is direct appointment and removals of Unemployed Council functionaries by the Party committees. These functionaries are responsible not to the masses but to the Party committees.