Quotes About Leadership

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You're Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.

He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands.

The problems that had been Obama's problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump's problems. But his people didn't seem to want to know about them.

The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.

The root of the CDC's behavior was simple: fear. They didn't want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.

Don't worry. You gave him the right answer." Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. "I wanted to see what type of person he was," he said later. "If he's pulling scholarships that they'd promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?" Coach O wasn't that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

At one point he turned to Christie and said, "Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.

the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency's inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. ("No one ever asked me," said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House.

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

When asked the key to his success, he said, "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

It's Groundhog Day," said Max. "The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, 'This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I've ever worked with.' This happens over and over and over.

a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.

With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.

What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked.

The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.