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Tom Burns Quotes
d. 2001 England
Tom Burns FBA (16 January 1913 - 20 June 2001) was a prominent British sociologist, author and founder of the Sociology department at Edinburgh University. He is known for his pioneering work on contingency theory.
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The beginning of administrative wisdom is the awareness that there is no one optimum type of management system.
The risks attendant upon change may have to be weighed against other risks arising from maintaining the same state of affairs.
The effective organization of industrial resources... alters in important respects in conformity with changes in extrinsic factors.
It follows that the more definition is given, the more omniscient the management must be, so that no functions are left whole or partly undischarged, no person is overburdened with undelegated responsibility, or left without the authority to do his job properly.
Management, often visualized as the complex hierarchy which is familiar in organization charts, operates a simple control system, with information flowing up through a succession of filters, and decisions and instructions flowing downwards through a succession of amplifiers.
All novelty involves some degree of risk. The vast majority of biological mutations are said to be harmful. When, as in human affairs, enormous numbers of random possibilities are eliminated by rational choice, the chances of harm rather than good resulting are reduced, not eliminated.