If managers didn’t demotivate employees, they wouldn’t have to look for ways to motivate them.

Don Gray

The present style of management is the biggest producer of waste, causing huge losses, whose magnitudes can not be evaluated, can not be measured.

William Edwards Deming

Ninety-five per cent of changes made by management today make no improvement.

William Edwards Deming

Communities of practice are groups of people whose interdependent practice binds them into a collective of shared knowledge and common identity. [...] When people work this way, barriers and boundaries between people and what they do are often insubstantial or irrelevant, since a collective endeavor holds people together.

Seely Brown

Guilds [were] social networks that generated beneficial social capital by sustaining shared norms, punishing violators of these norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action.

Sheilagh Ogilvie

The purpose of training is to reduce variety, to get a group of people tackling tasks in the same way; so training reduces variety. The purpose of learning is the exact opposite. Learning increases the individual’s capacity to respond to different situations; it increases variety.

Patrick Hoverstadt

Meestal is het systeem het probleem en niet de mensen. Als je een slecht systeem oplegt aan goede mensen, krijg je slechte resultaten. De bloemen die je wilt laten groeien, moet je water geven.

Stephen Covey

It may seem a bit odd to talk about “who” an organization is, or what an organization “stands for,” but it is not odd if you look at it as a human community. As a community, the organization came into being because there were enough people who cared about something to pursue it together.

Peter Senge

We can only improve worker hapiness when everyone feels responsible for management and learns to manage the system instead of managing each other.

Jurgen Appelo

Before you try to measure someone else's performance, please explain how you measure your own.

Jurgen Appelo

Treating employees like adult human beings might be common sense, but it is not common practice.

Jurgen Appelo

Scaling is only dificult when you grow your organization like a tower instead of a city.

Jurgen Appelo

The job of management is not to select the best ideas; it is to create a system that allows for the best ideas to emerge.

Jurgen Appelo

There will always be variation between people, in output, in service, and in product. What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, and about the people who work in it? Management requires knowledge about interaction of forces. Interaction may reinforce efforts or nullify efforts. Management of people requires knowledge of the effect of the system on the performance of people.

William Edwards Deming

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

Thomas Edison

The problem is, most companies today are run to minimize risk, not to maximize freedom and speed.
Things are changing so fast, that any thorough, MBA-style business plan is guaranteed to be wrong in some important way.

Eric Schmidt

Get the culture right and everything else just falls into place.

Tony Hsieh

Communication is as important as decision making, and like decision-making it is something that most leader think they are good at.
They are mostly wrong.

Eric Schmidt

But remember, the CEO needs to be the CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Innovation can't be owned or ordained, it needs to be allowed. You can't tell innovative people to be innovative, but you can let them.

Eric Schmidt

Hire character. Train skill.

Peter Schutz

Veel bedrijven hebben een misplaatst geloof in planning, onvoldoende begrip voor de onsystematische aard van het innovatieproces, een overdreven vertrouwen in grootschaligheid en een volledig gebrek aan inzicht in de werking van georganiseerde chaos en de cumulatieve waarde van veel kleine successen.

Tom Peters, Robert H. Waterman (In Search of Excellence)

The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.

Donella H. Meadows

Organisatieleren is het proces van ontdekken en herstellen van fouten in de organisatie.

Chris Argyris

The most efficient process is the one that you can avoid.

Nicholas Hartman

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor.

Barry Boehm

Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

W. Edwards Deming

Whenever I suggest stepping back, easing up, laughing a little at ourselves, and going outside our own field, somebody objects, saying, "But software is different. We have to work harder, concentrate more, because nothing is as complex as software." Well, of course software is different, and more complex than anything people have ever before attempted to engineer. But that's why we have to loosen our structure, not tighten them. That's why we must learn from any place we can, any way we can.

Jerry Weinberg

The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.

W. Edwards Deming

Conventional problem-solving would ask such questions as: Whose area is this? Who is supposed to replace worn gaskets? We don’t ask “why,” we ask “who.” We don’t look for causes in the system, we look for culprits in the work force. Performance appraisal is a “who-based” approach to problem-solving.

Peter Scholtes

To learn about factory floor problems, for example, you have to talk to people— and I don’t mean by just walking around. Somebody once described good management as management by walking around. Well, it helps to walk around a bit, but you do not learn about the real problems that way. When you are just wandering around, everything looks rosy. The only way to find out about problems is by talking to workers in a group setting. Just ask questions. Start off by asking, “What robs you of your pride of workmanship?” They will tell you.

W. Edwards Deming

Of course, when you talk about improvement of processes, you must include improvement of people. If management truly understood the concept of continual improvement, they would give their people every opportunity to learn and improve— and a chance to make contributions to the company. Organizations can no longer afford to just have good people— today, they need people who are improving continually.

W. Edwards Deming

I've learned over two decades that the number-one problem of both analysts and programmers - as well as their managers - is that they assume too much.

Gerald M. Weinberg,

If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.

Stephen Covey

It’s a waste of time to try to make a dysfunctional design work by improving its parts.

Daniel Quinn

Als mensen zich als dieren in een kooi gedragen, ligt het aan de kooi en niet aan de mensen.

Ricardo Semler

This is your battle, business leaders. The real battle is not against competitors. This is rubbish, very abstract. When do we meet competitors to fight them? The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness. Only you can fight, can do it.

Yves Morieux

Organization is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it's not all mixed up.

A. A. Milne

Greatness is above all else, a state of mind. You need to believe in your potential and power before you can bring them to life. You need to feel like you are extraordinary before you can become extraordinary. I call this "emotional blueprinting." To see spectacular results in your external life, you have to emotionally--viscerally--create a blueprint of your vision within your inner life.

Robin Sharma

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

E. F. Schumacher

Either you set your goals and, in doing so, have your life governed by choice or you do nothing and have your life governed by chance.

Robin Sharma

It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.

E. F. Schumacher

If you talk about change but don’t change the reward and recognition system, nothing changes.

Paul Allaire

Ware moed is niet geen angst te hebben, maar zijn angst te overwinnen.

Remy Montalee

If people no longer bring a leader their problems, they either think you can't solve it, or that you don't care.

Colin Powell

Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.

Brian Tracy

Een onderneming die niets anders voortbrengt dan geld is een armzalig soort organisatie.

Henry Ford

The secret of success is not to foresee the future. But to build an organization that is able to prosper in any of the foreseeable future.

Michael Hammer

In het verhaal van een team zit niet de oplossing, anders hadden ze hun probleem al opgelost. In hun verhaal zit wel de clou hoe ze zich klemzetten en daardoor het probleem in stand houden.

Marijke Lingsma