Most Popular Management and Leadership Quotes on Our Site in 2016

These were the most popular quotes on the Curious Cat Management and Leadership Quotes web site in 2016 (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. Performance appraisal is that occasion when once a year you find out who claims sovereignty over you. – Peter Block
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. 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

6. Real benefits come when managers begin to understand the profound difference between “cost cutting” and “eliminating the causes of costs.” – Brian Joiner
7. Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves. – Taiichi Ohno
8. A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming
9. A leader is a coach, not a judge. – W. Edwards Deming
10. Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence. – Sheryl Sandberg*
11. We need to work together to optimize the system as a whole, not to seek to optimize separate pieces… Optimizing separate pieces destroys the effectiveness of the whole. For the organization to work well as a whole, the components must work together. – Brian Joiner*
12. 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
13. Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. – Russell Ackoff
14. Winning companies win because they have good leaders who nurture the development of other leaders at all levels of the organization. – Noel Tichy*
15. 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
16. 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
17. All Models Are Wrong But Some Are Useful – George Box
18. There are three ways to get better figures… Improve the system… Distort the system… Distort the figures – Brian Joiner
19. There are three kinds of leaders. Those that tell you what to do. Those that allow you to do what you want. And Lean leaders that come down to the work and help you figure it out. – John Shook*
20. When we are blind to systemic causes of problems, all the solutions we try will likely make matters worse. – Esther Derby*

* new to the top quotes list this year

As you can see most of the most popular quotes from last year stayed popular this year.