A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

Elbert Hubbard, a leading voice of the American Arts-and-Crafts movement and founder of the Roycroft community, frequently wrote and lectured against bureaucratic inefficiency and in favor of decisive individual responsibility in business and public life. This quip reflects early-20th-century managerial skepticism about committees—seen as prone to delay, diffusion of responsibility, and compromise solutions. Hubbard’s aphoristic style (short, pointed, moralizing) was well suited to the period’s booming lecture circuit and the popular “maxims” culture of magazines and quotation columns, where such anti-bureaucratic observations circulated widely.

The remark argues that committees, by design, dilute responsibility and slow action: discussion, negotiation, and the need for consensus can turn simple tasks into protracted procedures. By contrasting “a week” with “an hour,” Hubbard uses exaggeration to emphasize the cost of collective decision-making—delay, diffusion of accountability, and the tendency toward lowest-common-denominator outcomes. The “one good man” is not merely any individual but a competent, empowered person who can decide and execute without procedural drag. The quote functions as a critique of bureaucratic culture and a defense of clear authority, suggesting that effectiveness often depends less on the number of participants than on competence, clarity of purpose, and the freedom to act.