Leadership Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen’s line has the clean, blunt geometry of a man who ran companies like a control room. No poetry, no comfort: management is decisions, then enforcement. It’s a definition that quietly rejects a more sentimental view of leadership as inspiration, culture-building, or “vision.” Those things may exist, but Geneen is saying they don’t count unless they harden into choices and measurable follow-through.

The specific intent is pragmatic and disciplinary. “Making decisions” implies a willingness to pick a path under uncertainty, to allocate resources, to disappoint someone. “Seeing that those decisions are implemented” is where the knife turns: it frames execution not as delegation and hope, but as oversight, accountability, and pressure. The subtext is that an organization naturally drifts. Left alone, plans dissolve into meetings, incentives misalign, middle layers sand off urgency. Management, in Geneen’s worldview, is the force that counteracts entropy.

Context matters: Geneen built his reputation at ITT during the mid-century boom in conglomerates, when scale was everything and coordination was the real product. In that era, “management” was often treated as a portable technology: buy firms, impose reporting systems, standardize performance, squeeze efficiencies. His sentence reads like a manifesto for that model - a reminder that authority is not a title but a repeated act: decide, then verify.

It also carries an implicit critique of modern corporate theater. If decisions aren’t implemented, Geneen suggests, you don’t have management - you have commentary.