55 Quotes About Committees

Let’s form a committee tasked with exploring why committees are so ineffective. Then we’ll stand-back and watch it argue and self-destruct.

All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't. . .

Having clear decision rules saves heartburn later.

Committees kill unconventional ideas for a living.

Had Newton served on more faculty committees at Cambridge, his first law of motion might have read: A decisionmaking body at rest or in motion tends to stay at rest or in motion in the same direction unless acted upon by an outside force.

It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel?We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

Ich bin Mitglied einer ministeriellen Konferenz. Bei einer Konferenz bringt jeder vor, was er haben möchte und für das Richtige hält, und zum Schluß ergibt sich etwas daraus, das keiner ganz gewollt hat: eben das Ergebnis.