Management Development Quotes

Leadership is hard to train on.

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.

I try to grow my management team as entrepreneurs, make the structure decentralized.

Strong succession planning is a critical element of all the Johnson enterprises.

I really do believe in succession building and giving people experience for future leadership.

The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.

While a lot of management development books try to teach you a lesson or give you a scenario of what corporate culture and work practices are about, they're theoretical and written in a sermonizing way. Most people don't get past the first chapter, and they just look nice on the bookshelf.

We have learned how to develop five-minute and even one-minute managers. But we would do better to ask ourselves what it takes to be an executive who helps build a better future.

Grow a leader-grow the organization. A company cannot grow without until its leaders grow within.

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.