How To Solve The Mismanagement Crisis Quotes

“Flexible people are rare. Organizations discourage flexibility by rewarding performance rather than development. Many organizations train people without developing them, or expect society at large to pay the price of development. These organizations may be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Organizations have to develop people in order to have promotable “raw material” that can be trained later on. The cost of training people who reject change and are defensive about their deficiencies is many times more expensive than the cost of development. Developing human resources is inexpensive as compared with the costs of turnover, the costs of repetitive training, and the costs of lowered morale.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“The purpose of the Adizes Method is to achieve the process of management described in this book. People participate on subjects which either affect them or to which they have something to contribute. Via synerteams and the POCs, they can change whatever can and needs to be changed. And the structured, disciplined decision-making process of the Adizes Method enables people to feel responsible for the decisions that are made cooperatively.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“The typical mistake of those who believe that management is necessarily elitist is that they assume that “management” as a group of people and “management” as a process are necessarily one and the same. But management is elitist only if a group of people monopolizes the managerial process—that is, the determination of what environmental threats and opportunities exist and how to react to them.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“Frederick Hertzberg begins his famous article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” as follows: “How many articles, books, speeches, and workshops have pleaded plaintively, ‘How do I get an employee to do what I want him to do?’” (italics added). Read it again. Is Hertzberg speaking about motivation or manipulation? In”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“Analysis of the history of any successful organization will show that it owed its success to a team of people whose styles, behavior, and needs were different but who could work together. Although organizational success is usually attributed to one person, behind that person is a team that enabled him to perform well.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“One of the deans of the Graduate School of Management at UCLA had a sign on his door that read something like: “Warning: I might incorporate you to implement your own ideas.” The sign itself, I was told, made several creative faculty members turn away with their suggestions while still at the door.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“I call the PAEI the Textbook Manager because one finds him only in textbooks.1 At this point, what should be clear is that no one person behaves like a PAEI. The textbooks that describe management assume a perfect person who does not exist.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“One might expect to find creativity throughout an organization managed by an Arsonist, but the opposite is usually true. The Arsonist monopolizes the organization’s creativity. He regards any other entrepreneurs as competitors who must be eliminated. An organization managed by an Arsonist is not a creative, flexible structure but a slave ship—a claque of applauders. The Arsonist sets the course, changes direction, delights in the suffering of his subordinates, and takes all the credit for successes.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“The Arsonist’s individualism creates centralization in decision making, but it is decision making with an interesting managerial twist. The Arsonist’s decisions are extremely vague, and yet he expects the details to be worked out in exact accordance with wishes that he never explained fully and was probably unaware of initially.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“An organization managed by a Bureaucrat may achieve its goals in spite of its manager because people learn to bypass him. However, the harder the Arsonist tries to manage, the further behind his organization gets. While the Arsonist is busy making everyone else busy, the organization is going nowhere. The Arsonist changes direction too often, and his subordinates do not actually cooperate. The Arsonist fails because an organization cannot constantly change direction.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis

“Subordinates soon learn not to ask the Arsonist for help in solving the problems that he assigned them. If they do, instead of trying to identify the barriers to a solution, he changes the assignment altogether, and in the process he overloads his subordinates with new problems.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis