Quotes about Committee Dynamics

Anthony Sampson

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

Henry A. Kissinger

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Benjamin Franklin

The chairman of a committee should be in harmony with the majority who constitute it.

In 1871 the congressman refused to serve as chairman of a committee to investigate the Ku Klux Klan. Such pandering to the South was common for politicians who had national aspirtation. If the politican served on such a committee, he would have to aknowledge the existance of the murders, torture, and other criminal activity of an organzation that was very popular in the South. Or he would have to cover up the KKK crimes and lose the support of Northerners. So refusing to serve on the committee was the prudent solution.

C. Northcote Parkinson

A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.

Celia Green

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

Henry Paulson

I would come to New York, work, and then get out of New York. I didn't go out to dinner with other people on the Management Committee. I didn't socialize. I didn't politick.

Raja Krishnamoorthi

When the chair of an investigating committee refuses to share vital findings or source information with any of his colleagues, his committee's ability to function has been fundamentally undermined.

Committee Dynamics Quotes