Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits (J-B Warren Bennis Series)

No beautiful secretaries, no pre-packaged rations, no cars or fluttering pennants . . . no military bands. But victory, damn it, victory!33

THE SURE-FIRE TOWNSEND INNOVATION TEST. If you come up with a new idea for your department or division, you can get an almost infallible early reading on it. 1. If everybody gives it something between active indifference and hot opposition, the idea is valid.

I learned that I needed to subordinate myself to those I led.Your job as leader is get to the lowest level and find out the tools your people need—whether it’s a shovel or a computer—to get the job done. When we were starting

once a month to put everything that was wrong at Radica on one sheet of paper—he’d told me he’d assume the best if I didn’t tell him otherwise. If a memo about a problem ever exceeded one page, he told me I didn’t understand the problem. Once a year, he asked for a one-page plan in case I went down in an airplane—that was the beginning of our succe

Synergism, a business fad like hula hoops, holds that two and two makes five. Horseshit.Two and two usually makes three, and you know it. Because divisions forced to deal with one another learn to hate with a passion—and find ways to take it out on one another.

“And God created the Organization and gave It dominion over man.” Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

Things get done in our society because of a man or a woman with conviction.

There is nothing to distinguish their generals from their private soldiers except the star they wear on their collars. Their uniform is cut out of the same material, they wear the same boots, their cork helmets are identical and their colonels go on foot like privates. They

I was honest about the problems, and they motivated themselves to solve them; I couldn’t do that for them.