A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Management (35 quotes)
Management [is] borrowing, burrowing, barrowing.
Marshall McLuhan
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 13
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Management
Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 104
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The change in information which is created by the moving of information at the speed of light, means that the decision-maker lives in a kind of overall field of fact and data which alters the scope and character of the decisions he has to make.
Letter to Edward S. Morgan May 16, 1959, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 252
Year: 1959
In a fat corporation the oily executive rises to the top.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Year: 1972
As any executive climbs up the echelons of the organization chart, his involvement in the organization becomes less and less.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 30
Year: 1970
As oral resonance erodes the boundaries of the old economics, turning the planet into a single Echoland, a word now makes the market.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 82
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The businessman, paradoxically, is quicker to understand the potential of new cultural achievement than the intellectual.
“The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion”, in MASS MEDIA IN CANADA, Edited by John A. Irving, 1962, p.183
Year: 1962
People of promise, and promising enterprises, like promissory notes, have become inseparable from the promises of promotion and advertising itself. Money in turn is a promise to pay promises, and the plausible con-man has returned as the stand-in for the traditional gentleman.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 79
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Money
Drawn to McLuhan #9
The story of modern America that began with the discovery of the white man by the Indians, as a wag has truly said, quickly passed from exploration by canoe to development by railway.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pages 101-102.
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The emperor and clown are complementary. The clown is the emperor’s private self seeking contact with the people and situations that he embodies corporately in his role. The clown is free to spoof the emperor, to test his moods for the benefit and entertainment of the court. The clown is a type of audience researcher or consultant, just as our audience researchers and consultants have become the clowns of our culture. Today we see the emergence of a new type of executive who can switch roles from clown to emperor to probe the environment through his awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 202
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Complementarities | Roles
In every field there is a marked trend towards the conferring upon the individual operator a more and more creative role in overall design. I suppose we are approaching the ultimate phase of this autonomous and creative character in the threatened joblessness of the approaching age of the computer.
“Public and Private Sectors in the Electric Age” (1964), p 7
Year: 1964
Chapters:
He’s Hopeful | Jobs
Most large corporate organizations have little sense of their social personality.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 120
Year: 1989
The commercial corporate organization is, after all, a broad extension of the human mind; it develops controlling structures to organize human behavior to produce an economic benefit.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 121
Year: 1989
To pull up stakes and move families as a means of advancing up the corporate ladder is no longer considered a very practical or rewarding thing by big business.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1973, in Media Research, 1997, p 191
Year: 1973
The work ethic is being overlaid very quickly by these new forms of organization so that twentieth-century man not only experiences his subliminal life being pushed up into consciousness, but the daily process of living takes on an increasingly mythic or corporate participation in processes that had previously been kept down in the unconscious.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1973, in Media Research, 1997, p 108
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Competition | Complementarities
The old structure of delegated authority and specialized jobs did not demand people of inclusive consciousness and powers of ready inter-relation. The new executive has to be a person with an ever wider range of awareness, and he looks to the educational establishment to widen and deepen its entire operation to this end.
“The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion”, 1960, in Media Research, 1997, p 25
Year: 1960
Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and “human” service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty.
The Medium is the Massage with Quentin Fiore, 1967, p 20
Year: 1967
Bureaucracy in all its forms is in trouble. Even the telephone system itself is now pressed by satellite speed-up. The stock exchange has to close down for awhile every week in order to sort out the securities that were earlier sold by electric speeds.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 116-18, 1969, Transcript, p 4
Year: 1969
We have to know what we are doing in advance.
We have to repeat what we were about to say.
“The Be-Spoke Tailor” in Explorations 8, October (1957),unnumbered page “section 4”, Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), no page # in reprint.
Year: 1957
The oral man never asks for a blueprint. He never wants an over-all view. His but to feel he is a member of the team. The only possibility in an oral structure is a monarchical apex of control. Where the activities of many are to be orchestrated there can be only one conductor. But the more necessary the conductor the more expendable he becomes. The first job of a top executive today is to see to it that there are several who can succeed him instantly. They often do!
“The Organization Man”, Explorations 8, October (1957), unnumbered page “section 15”, Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), no page # in reprint.
Year: 1957
Chapter:
Retribalizing
We have reversed the flow of information which was once invested entirely in the production end of activity. We now have comparably exact information about the market side of the picture. So that we can now, like the writer of detective stories, work backwards in order to reconstruct the exact order of events.
“Conspicuous Co-Existence” (1957), p 6
Year: 1957
Chapter:
Effect
To say that the executive has to be pragmatic does not say anything. It is like saying that the executive has to be an executive. He is a figure in a ground that is changing very rapidly.
J.P.M. van Santen Interview, Toronto, October 25, 1972, transcript, pp 3-4
Year: 1972
The plain fact is that the only way to keep up with enemies or rivals is to be ahead of them – by sheer design.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Change
To keep up with we must be far ahead. It would have been proper to say “ahead with the poets and the artists,” if they had not become so eager to adjust to the consumer mores. Not they are what we have to adjust to. Whereas the arts used to be navigational, the role of the arts can no longer be the same in the satellite age, when the Earth has become an art form itself.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 216
Year: 1972
John Kenneth Galbraith argues that businessmen must now study art, for the artist makes models of problems and situations that have not yet emerged in the larger matrix of society, giving the artistically perceptive businessman a decade of leeway in his planning.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 243
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Art, Artists
It is one of the ironies of the electronic age that the businessman must become alert and highly trained in the world of the arts. It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture,” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 44
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Art, Artists
It is one of the ironies of the electronic age that the businessman must become alert and highly trained in the world of the arts.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), p 101
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Art, Artists | Dropout
The mere interrelating of people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the delegated authority. Especially with the computer, the work effort is applied at the "programming" level , and such effort is one of information and knowledge. In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speed-ups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge." It is as if a symphony composer, instead of sending his manuscript to the printer and thence to the conductor and to the individual members of the orchestra, were to compose directly on an electronic instrument that would render each note or theme as if on the appropriate instrument.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 263-264
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Authority of Knowledge | Money
The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and 'owners'.
“The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth,” Explorations insert in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate, Number 30, Spring, 1971, p 110
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Information
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 92
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time.
“An Interview: McLuhan on Russia”, The McLuhan DEW-Line, Volume 2, No.6, May/June, 1970, p 3
Year: 1970
Compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive ‘doing’.
A voice of an old man, in The Medium is the Massage LP (1968), transcript 10:32
Year: 1968
Big committees are formed for the purpose of passing the buck. Nobody will admit that they have power anymore, because when everybody has for free [information] what nobody could buy before, for any amount of money, we're communists.
“Watergate-Participatory Torture”, 1973, p 3
Year: 1973
Nobody is controlling the switchboard. With Watergate, nobody made one decision about anything.
“Watergate-- Participatory Torture”, 1973, p 3
Year: 1973
It was Aristotle who pointed out, way back in that period when they were just discovering visual space and values, that any form, any kind of organized form, when pushed to its limits, instantly assumes the opposite characteristics. We have seen this happen in our own time. Culture has become our business. Ours used to be a business civilization with a little culture added. Now, in the age when the knowledge industries have become overwhelmingly dominant, culture has become the primary mark of our age.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 81
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Aristotle | Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
The organization chart is not very necessary anymore. It’s no longer of use. That little series of classified levels and categories, and initiatives, doesn’t obtain in business anymore. The dialogue and interplay between these levels are so considerable that they have had to cross out the organization chart these last twenty years. … The business community is not motivated by disinterested passion for knowledge, but it is desperately eager to survive, and therefore its motivation in learning is considerable. I have spoken a great deal to management groups over the past twenty years, and I have always found them very flexible, very eager to learn, and they have a lot to learn in our time. They’re just as desperately hard-pressed by innovation in new technology as any part of the community.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 109
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Dialogue | Linear and Nonlinear