If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time. Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack. Tom DeMarco
I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that.
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Robert Michaels
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
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John C. Maxwell
Most of the upper management of I.S. were undead. I always thought it was because the job was easier if you didn't have a soul.
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Kim Harrison
Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.
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Rashedur Ryan Rahman
Never justify someones wrong action, without them apologizing first & admitting their wrongs. If you do. You are not making them better, but you are making them worse on the bad things they do.
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Unknown
More Quotes By Tom DeMarco
The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.
Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.
Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition...
If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up...
There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.
