Quotes About Leadership

You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?

I want you to improve your ability to improve your company by leading the process of improvement, not by improving a process in your company by yourself. The improvement of your company will be a function of your enhanced ability to improve your company, which is the skill of innovation.

And because it starts that way, it is more likely to continue that way. And therein resides the true difference between an Adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a Mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped.

great businesses are not built by extraordinary people but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

It reveals an understanding of what makes a great business great. It also tells us what makes all other businesses survivable at their best; intolerable at their worst.

And that is the sign of a Mature company. A Mature company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.

General management is more than the stewardship of individual functions. Its core is strategy: defining and communicating the company's unique position, making trade-offs, and forging fit among activities.

Loose management practices dominate agency cultures, just as they did during the high-profit past. Client heads are not held accountable for depressed fee levels, unmanaged workloads or insufficient resources for client work. Office heads are not held accountable for the varied performance of their client heads.

The real agency problem resides in the C-suite of ad agencies, and it is to the C-suite that we must turn to find leadership for the required changes. This won't happen unless agency CEOs finally admit that poor pricing is the fundamental problem that must be solved. Agency CEOs have the responsibility to solve the price problem. It's time to get started.

Poor leadership" is a major cause of job dissatisfaction and low morale. More than half of those with low morale rated the leadership at their company as "inadequate."34

Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.

Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power

May those of us with a shared vision of where we need to go and how to get there find each other and provide part of the structure around which the whole can reorganize itself.

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem "If" was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader's actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007).

A core attribute of the effective leader is the act of inspiring and developing others. Leaders model by their actions.

I quickly learned that success in any area of life, be it in the boardroom or on the battlefield, is overwhelmingly dependant upon a person's mastery of their own mind. General Patton once said: "If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do...

Others felt that their question had already been answered in the minds of other group members, and if they asked the question, it would be considered a dumb question, and they would be put down as being stupid or not going along with the group. Because people did not ask questions, people lost lives when the Titanic sank, when the Challenger crashed, when President Kennedy authorized a covert attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.

If nobody will help you, do it alone! There is no 'i' in team, but there is '1' in WIN!

Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn't want to be challenged. And I earned that right because [other] teammates came after me. They didn't endure all the things that I endured.

Whenever they speak Michael Jordan, they should speak Scottie Pippen.

Whoever is the team leader of the team, I'm going to be going after him. And I'm not going to do it with my voice.' Because I had no voice. I had no status. I had to do it with the way that I played.

Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game and I wasn't going to take anything less. When people see this, they gonna say, He wasn't really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant. Well, that's you, because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of it as well.

What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss, he said, was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.