Organizational Challenges Quotes

We were fighting a war. We did not have time for duplicate vouchers and double-entry bookkeeping. It is a hell-fired shame for everybody [on this Congressional committee] to be trying to pick flyspecks on the greatest army the world ever knew. We did more organization despite our unpreparedness than the French and the British. What do you suppose we went to war for? We went to France to win the war [World War I] and we did it.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

Problems in a company are like cockroaches in the kitchen. You will never find just one

An organization that is not facing up to people who are not getting the job done, is going to have difficulties.

I never want to get content. I never want to think that I'm at a certain spot and I'm gonna stay there, because this organization's hard to stay in, and this is the wrong place to get complacent in.

Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven't done well. It's that simple.

To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

I'm organized, but receipts tend to mess up my system. They're barbarians! So I store them in a notepad.

Our bureaucracy had excelled at compartmentalizing intelligence - we had a 'need to know' system - but by 2004, it was impossible to foresee what elements of our organization would and would not need to know a given piece of information.

I do have some young coaches, but I don't really believe that is the biggest problem we have here.

I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.

I don't really understand how to do bureaucratic things - school-system things.

I have a very big apartment in Paris but you can't really move around there anymore; piles of books everywhere. I don't want any more books. I have too many books; sometimes I have to buy another copy of a book that I know I have somewhere in my house or office because I can't find it.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

Tell me one industry where there are no problems. Whatever problems are there are similar to the problems faced elsewhere.

It's always a challenge whenever you have to nurture more than one culture inside an organization. When I say culture, you have one group that will have one set of priorities, and another with another set. It creates a different cultural environment.

The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.

The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations: It’s a process, not an event.

A lot of [bureaucratic] rules were created a long time ago when there were different challenges, and they are now causing negative side effects.

If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.

In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.