Most Popular Management and Leadership Quotes on Our Site in 2015

These were the most popular quotes on the Curious Cat Management and Leadership Quotes web site in 2015 (based on page views). Follow the link on the quote text for the source and more information on the quote.

1. Having no problems is the biggest problem of all. – Taiichi Ohno
2. Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. – Russell Ackoff
3. Don’t look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don’t think with you head, think with your hands. – Taiichi Ohno
4. The answer to the question managers so often ask of behavioral scientists “How do you motivate people?” is, “You don’t.” – Douglas McGregor
5. Performance appraisal is that occasion when once a year you find out who claims sovereignty over you. – Peter Block
6. A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming
7. People who can’t understand numbers are useless. The gemba where numbers are not visible is also bad. However, people who only look at the numbers are the worst of all. – Taiichi Ohno
8. We believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three… Because you’ve take care of the customer, take care of the employees, shareholder will be taken care of. – Jack Ma
9. A leader is a coach, not a judge. – W. Edwards Deming
10. Real benefits come when managers begin to understand the profound difference between “cost cutting” and “eliminating the causes of costs.” – Brian Joiner
11. Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves. – Taiichi Ohno
12. A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution. – Russell Ackoff
13. 95% of changes made by management today make no improvement. – Peter Scholtes
14. blame the process not the person. We need to ask, “how did the process allow this to happen?” – Brian Joiner
15. Good execution of performance appraisal is not the solution. More people are realizing that improving how performance appraisal are done is an attempt to do the wrong thing better. If you insist on doing the wrong thing, I suppose you might as well do it better but how about just not doing the wrong thing at all? – John Hunter
16. A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole. It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system. – Russell Ackoff
17. All Models Are Wrong But Some Are Useful – George Box
18. It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth. – W. Edwards Deming
19. the aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort. – W. Edwards Deming
20. There are three ways to get better figures… Improve the system… Distort the system… Distort the figures – Brian Joiner