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If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation.

— James G. March Ideas as Art (2006)

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Leadership

More quotes by James G. March

No organization works if the toilets don't work, but I don't believe that finding solutions to business problems is my job.

Ideas as Art (2006)

I am not now, nor I have ever been, relevant.

Ideas as Art (2006)

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

Social, political and economic institutions have become larger, considerably more complex and resourceful, and prima facie more important to collective life. Many of the major actors in modern economic and political systems are formal organizations, and the institutions of law and bureaucracy occupy a dominant role in contemporary life.

Pure rationality and limited rationality share a common perspective, seeing decisions as based on evaluation of alternatives in terms of their consequences for preferences. This logic of consequences can be contrasted with a logic of appropriateness by which actions are matched to situations by means of rules organized into identities.

James G. March (1994)

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Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti.

Henry Miller My Bike & Other Friends (1977)

It's simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers is the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.

Warren Buffett Letters to Shareholders (1957)

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

George S. Patton

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

George S. Patton War As I Knew It (1947)

Attribution

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