Managing Without Management

"The ideology of capitalism has shifted from cost-plus to price-minus. Competition favors consumers and the leanest and most-friendly corporations, and is leading to the death both of inflation and of management."

"Better to take empowerment to its extreme and relabel it Small is Beautiful! Better to slay the dragon and encourage the fall of the large managed corporation."

"In the future complexity will both be less necessary and more costly."

"Customer delight drives high relative market share, low relative costs, and high relative profitability and cashflow."

"IT should make it easier to focus on customers; and firms that do are naturally more hungry for technological assistance."

"Investor power is the most immediate constraint on the power of management."

"The largest hiding places of unnecessary management are large domestically oriented competitors in protected markets."

"When new volume requires additional people within an organization to cope with the new demand, the cost can go up not just pro rata with the volume increase, or in a small step increase, but by a multiple of the original cost."

"Willpower, the determination of the leader to win, cult of personality, personal eloquence, and that indefinable something that others call charisma: these are all essential characteristics of red-blooded leaders."

"The challenges employees face will be greater. They will need to do more than they do now, and do it better. They will have to be more flexible and develop new skills."

"The best Western firms have begun to destroy the hierarchy, create self-managing work teams, and give great importance to project teams."

"The employed are getting richer. The unemployed, at the same time that they are becoming more numerous, are also becoming poorer, at least in comparative terms."