Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!
One of the greatest values of controversy is its revealing nature. The real issues at stake come into the open and have the possibility of being reconciled.
What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of the utmost importance that these should not be considered the same.
Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals...the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.
Another idea that is changing is that the leader must be one who can make quick decisions. The leader to-day is often one who thinks out his decisions very slowly.
And the most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which belong in his present picture but which are not yet there.
I stand on the sidewalk watching it because the responsibility is mine and I must, I take a very firm hold on the handles of the baby carriage and I wheel it into the traffic.
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
[On her recently widowed father's much younger wife:] My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love, and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.
The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them, they have a vision of the future.
The conflict of chemistry we do not think reprehensible. If we could look at social conflict as neither good nor bad, but simply a fact, we should make great strides in our thinking.
Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.
I do not think that we have psychological and ethical and economic problems. We have human problems, with psychological, ethical and economical aspects, and as many others as you like.
Part of the task of the leader is to make others participate in his leadership. The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power.
The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.
It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily a wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities, but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned.
When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power. And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power.
Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
I am convinced that any feeling of exaltation because we have people under us should be conquered, for I am sure that if we enjoy being over people, there will be something in our manner which will make them dislike being under us.
The foreman today does not merely deal with trouble, he forestalls trouble. In fact, we don't think much of a foreman who is always dealing with trouble; we feel that if he is doing his job properly, there won't be so much trouble.
Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole - such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life - the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement.
It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power.
An order then should always be given not as a personal matter, not because the man giving it wants the thing done, but because it is the demand of the situation. And an order of this kind carries weight because it is the demand of the situation.
There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.
The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.
A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.
I wish we could understand the word expert as expressing an attitude of mind which we can all acquire rather than the collecting of information by a special caste. ... Many of us are calling for experts because, acutely conscious of the mess we are in, we want someone to pull us out.
The leader is one who can organize the experience of the group ... and thus get the full power of the group. The leader makes the team. This is pre-eminently the leadership quality - the ability to organize all the forces there are in an enterprise and make them serve a common purpose.
Now that we are recognizing more fully the value of the individual, now that management is defining more exactly the function of each, many are coming to regard the leader as the man who can energize his group, who knows how to encourage initiative, how to draw from all what each has to give.
The most successful leader of all is the one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which are not yet there... Above all, he should make his co-workers see that it is not his purpose which is to be achieved, but a common purpose, born of the desires and the activities of the group.
We are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations . . . Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within nations.
while the executive should give every possible value to the information of the specialist, no executive should abdicate thinking on any subject because of the expert. The expert's information or opinion should not be allowed automatically to become a decision. On the other hand, full recognition should be given to the part the expert plays in decision making.
Children, it should be repeated, are not pocket editions of adults, because childhood is a period of physical growth and development, a period of preparation for adult responsibility and public and private life. A program of children cannot be merely an adaptation of the program for adults, nor should it be curtailed during periods of depression or emergency expansion of other programs.
Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader - the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader.
There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments. ... To find the significant rather than the dramatic features of industrial controversy, of a disagreement in regard to policy on board of directors or between managers, is essential to integrative business policies.
Wherever I am, I see the yoke on women in some form or another. On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden. On others pride hushes them to silence; no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy. On some it galls and chafes; they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to 'drag life's lengthening chain along.
the point of educating instead of blaming seems to me very important. For nothing stultifies one more than being blamed. Moreover, if the question is, who is to blame?, perhaps each will want to place the blame on someone else, or on the other hand, someone may try to shield his fellow-worker. In either case the attempt is to hide the error and if this is done the error cannot be corrected.
if you wish to train yourself for higher executive positions, the first thing for you to decide is what you are training for. Ability to dominate or manipulate others? That ought to be easy enough, since most of the magazines advertise sure ways of developing something they call 'personality.' But I am convinced that the first essential of business success is the capacity for organized thinking.
the leader releases energy, unites energies, and all with the object not only of carrying out a purpose, but of creating further and larger purposes. And I do not mean here by larger purposes mergers or more branches; I speak of larger in the qualitative rather than the quantitative sense. I mean purposes which will include more of those fundamental values for which most of us agree we are really living.
We often tend to think that the executive wishes to maintain standard, wishes to reach a certain quality of production, and that the worker has to be goaded in some way to do this. Again and again we forget that the worker is often, usually I think, equally interested, that his greatest pleasure in his work comes from the satisfaction of worthwhile accomplishment, of having done the best of which he was capable.
It is always the sign of the second-rate man when the decision merely meets the present situation. It is the left-over in a decision which gives it its greatest value. It is the carry-over in the decision which helps develop the situation in the way we wish it to be developed. The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them; they have a vision of the future.
a little of the ready reliance on the expert comes from the desire to waive responsibillity, comes from the endless evasion of life instead of an honest facing of it. The expert is to many what the priest is, someone who knows absolutely and can tell us what to do. The king, the priest, the expert, have one after the other had our allegiance, but so far as we put any of them in the place of ourselves, we have not a sound society and neither individual nor general progress.
many rules could be made for the giving of orders. Don't preach when you give orders. Don't discuss matters already settled unless you have fresh data. Make your direction so specific that there will be no question whether they have been obeyed or not. Find out how to give directions and yet to allow people opportunity for independent thinking, for initiative. And so on and so on. Order-giving requires just as much study and just as much training as any other skill we wish to acquire.
We have thought of peace as passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences ... From War to Peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life ... The world will be regenerated by the people who rise above these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people can agree.