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Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer – not “by guess and by God”.

— Lyndall Urwick

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More quotes by Lyndall Urwick

Wherever human activities are carried out in an organised and co-operative form, there management must be found.

and Brech (1949)

At the present time administration is more an art than a science; in fact there are those who assert dogmatically that it can never be anything else. They draw no hope from the fact that metallurgy, for example, was completely an art several centuries before it became primarily a science and commenced its great forward strides after generations of intermittent advance and decline.

[Functionalism is a] dividing up of activities as to kinds.

The concept of management as a specific body of knowledge and practice forming the basis of a specialised profession ... Wherever human activities are carried out in an organised and co-operative form, there management must be found.

There is nothing which rots morale more quickly and more completely than poor communication and indecisiveness - the feeling that those in authority do not know their own minds. And there is no condition which more quickly produces a sense of indecision among subordinates or more effectively hampers communication than being responsible to a superior who has too wide a span of control.

p. 43; cited in: Colin Combe (2014)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lyndall Urwick (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.