Decentralized Management Quotes

You cannot manage an airline from a corner office in Willis Tower. That doesn't work. You've got to manage by walking around.

Why shouldn't public housing be run by the tenants?

Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.

In life, we do not give employees enough leeway. If you look around Semco's office, there are plenty of empty desks. The question is - where are these people? I do not have the slightest idea, but I am not interested.

Organizations should be built and managers should be functioning so people can be naturally empowered. If someone's doing their job, if someone's working in one of your warehouses, say, they should know their job better than anybody. They don't need to be 'empowered,' but encouraged and left alone to be able to do what they know best.

The key to management is to get rid of the managers.

When you're invested in your own business, you're going to run it better. When people are financially responsible for whether their store succeeds, they're going to have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's harder to get if headquarters is running things.

I believe in decentralized management that includes a lot of delegation, empowerment, and accountability.

In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.

If there are only three guys at the top of the organization handling things, it's the definition of a bankrupt company. In creating leaders without titles, we are going to have organizations with people at the helm putting forth their best.

Google teams have lots of autonomy, including from people like me.

I don't believe very much in corporate offices. I believe in leaders who are with their customers and their people.

I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control managing. But I can't prove that. And there are no models.

Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management - this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.

It's not a question of arriving and putting in a whole new administration, but instead, arriving and "compacting" things as much as possible, reducing management layers. We want as few management layers as possible, so that executives are very close to the operations. We also don't believe in having big corporate infrastructures.