management complexity Quotes

I started off life at Pixar with interesting technical problems. But as time has moved on, I found that the social and management problem was far more complex and interesting.

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood……. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simple minded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough minded people are the most simple.

We have a terrific team, and our managers are terrific managers, but we have made it too complicated for them and too complicated in a way that they just can't do an excellent job in many cases when it comes to the customer experience.

As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn't. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.

As your organizational authority increases, your organizational IQ decreases.

It doesn't make much sense and it's nil premium. They're going to have co-CEOs...which is a very uncomfortable structure.

Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.

I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.

One cannot be successful on visible figures alone ... the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them.