"It is not size that counts in business. Some companies with $500,000 capital net more profits than other companies with $5 million. Size is a handicap unless efficiency goes with it."

"Herbert Casson was a highly prolific writer on management, with a career as a management guru spanning some four decades. A skilled writer who was also a successful entrepreneur, he used his own experiences and acute observations of the world around him to develop a philosophy of management based on the concept of ‘efficiency’. He published more than seventy books, which by the time of his death had sold more than half a million copies around the world. Something of a maverick, he was never really accepted by the business academic community in either Britain or America. His books were popular and populist, highly entertaining and full of penetrating insight."

"Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft, and science meet. But in a classroom of students without managerial experience, these have no place to meet — there is nothing to do."

"Data don't generate theory – only researchers do that."

"The professional administrators — especially those at higher levels — serve key roles at the boundary of the organization, between the professionals inside and interested parties — governments, client associations, and so on — on the outside. On the one hand, the administrators are expected to protect the professionals' autonomy, to "buffer" them from external pressures. On the other hand, the administrators are expected to woo these outsiders to support the organization, both morally and financially. Thus, the external roles of the manager—maintaining liaison contacts, acting as figurehead and spokesman in a public relations capacity,negotiating with outside agencies—emerge as primary ones in professional administration."

"The formalization of behavior takes formal power away from the workers and the managers who supervise them and concentrates it near the top of the line hierarchy and in the technostructure, thus centralizing the organization in both dimensions. The result is Type A decentralization. Training and indoctrination produces exactly the opposite effect: it develops expertise below the middle line, thereby decentralizing the structure in both dimensions (Type E). Putting these two conclusions together, we can see that specialization of the unskilled type centralizes the structure in both dimensions, whereas specialization of the skilled or professional type decentralizes it in both dimensions."

"We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective."

"Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes (themselves informational)."

"Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills."

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers."

"Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving."

"For two hundred and fifty years, from the second half of the eighteenth Century on, Capitalism was the dominant social reality. For the last Hundred years, Marxism was the dominant social ideology. Both are rapidly being superseded by a new and very different society. The new society – and it is already here – is a post-capitalist society... The center of gravity in the post-capitalist society – its structure, its social and economic dynamics, its social classes, and its social problems – is very different from the one that dominated the last two hundred and fifty years"

"We create organizations to serve us, but somehow they also force us to serve them. Sometimes it feels as if our institutions have run out of control, like the machinery of Charlie Chaplin's film Modem Times. Why we should become slaves to our servants... A society of organizations is one in which organizations enter our lives as influential forces in a great many ways — in how we work, what we eat, how we get educated and cured of our illnesses, how we get entertained, and how our ideas are shaped. The ways in which we try to control our organization and our organization in return try to control us become major issues in the lives of all of us."

"Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it"

"Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing. T. S. Eliot writes in one of his poems, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Reflection is about getting the meaning."

"Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs — and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information."

"Some Blockett-type employees actually believe that they have received a genuine promotion; others recognize the truth. But the main function of a pseudo-promotion is to deceive people outside the hierarchy. When this is achieved, the maneuver is counted a success."

"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Do not be fooled by apparent exceptions."

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

"In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level."

"Occupational incompetence is everywhere. Have you noticed it? Probably we all have noticed it."

"Dr. Peter effectively destroys examples of seeming exceptions and is rather convincing that his principle is ubiquitous."

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."

"When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation."

"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?"

"Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object."

"The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time."

"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

"On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman."

"The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively."

"Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence"

"Never stand when you can sit; never walk when you can ride; never Push when you can Pull."