“What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting—a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please”

“an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business.”

“Finally, everyone involved must give the decision reached by the group full support. This does not necessarily mean agreement: so long as the participants commit to back the decision, that is a satisfactory outcome.”

“The next stage is reaching a clear decision. Again, the greater the disagreement about the issue, the more important becomes the word clear. In fact, particular pains should be taken to frame the terms of the decision with utter clarity.”

“The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated. The greater the disagreement and controversy, the more important becomes the word free.”

“Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.”

“Of course, you can’t spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly.”

“we must first overcome cultural prejudice. Our society respects someone’s throwing himself into sports, but anybody who works very long hours is regarded as sick, a workaholic. So the prejudices of the majority say that sports are good and fun, but work is drudgery, a necessary evil, and in no way a source of pleasure.”

“Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff.”

“our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals (to move them along the horizontal axis shown in the illustration on this page), and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.”

“You cannot stay in the self-actualized mode if you’re always worried about failure.”

“I think, by applying our production principles. First, we must identify our limiting step: what is the “egg” in our work?”

“if we want to cultivate achievement-driven motivation, we need to create an environment that values and emphasizes output.”

“The subordinate did poor work. My associate’s reaction: ‘He has to make his own mistakes. That’s how he learns!’ The problem with this is that the subordinate’s tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong.”

“Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.”

“But be sure to know exactly what you’re doing, and avoid the charade of insincere delegation, which can produce immense negative managerial leverage.”

“The “delegator” and “delegatee” must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems, a”

“Thus, a very important way to increase productivity is to arrange the work flow inside our black box so that it will be characterized by high output per activity, which is to say high-leverage activities.”

“If you only understand one thing about building products, you must understand that energy put in early in the process pays off tenfold and energy put in at the end of the program pays off negative tenfold.”

“So even if you’re just an invited participant, you should ask yourself if the meeting—and your attendance—is desirable and justified.”

“So even if you’re just an invited participant, you should ask yourself if the meeting—and your attendance—is desirable and justified.”

“You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”

“Andy introduces management with this classic equation: A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.”

“as a manager in such a workplace, you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder.”