Quotes About Leadership

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results.

the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.

Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence - more plow horse than show horse.

Shared vision is the crucial link in making decentralization work.

those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity.

In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.

The "yes-men" problem is mentioned here. The author says that even though "yes-people" can be pleasing to a leader, they will be disastrous in the long term because they serve to obscure the real problems. The

Overcome lack of centralized control with increased communication and informal coordination. People need to know what other decentralized sub-units are doing so that they can act in concert with them.

Have an open system. People operating autonomously can make good decisions only if they have good information. One of the best ways to achieve this is to make lots of information available to people—even traditionally sensitive information.

Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with going from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.

Be there first, be there fast, build market share—no matter how expensive—and you win," yelled the entrepreneurs.

Avoid matrix structures. In an attempt to have the best of both worlds, some companies make the mistake of creating matrix organizations. Don't do this. Matrix structures remove the fire of personal ownership, not to mention accountability.

In another, drawn directly from his own comments on leading change, the word I appears forty-four times ("I could lead the charge"; "I wrote the twelve objectives"; "I presented and explained the objectives"), whereas the word we appears just sixteen times.

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving."38

If you create a place where the best people always have a seat on the bus, they're more likely to support changes in direction. For

Leaders of great companies are always moving forward—progressing—as individuals (personal growth) and they pass this ever forward psychology along to the company. They have a high energy level and never become complacent.

We all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad [Sam Walton] as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

We know some effective leaders who work only 40–50 hours a week, but who we nonetheless classify as very hard workers—their level of intensity and concentration when at work is incredibly high. Conversely, we know some workaholics who work 90 hours per week and are basically ineffective. More is not necessarily better.

Put objective, honest outsiders on your board of directors.

It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place. If you have the right executives on the bus, they will do everything within their power to build a great company, not because of what they will "get" for it, but because they simply cannot imagine settling for anything less. Their

If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great.

A leader speaks to the finer qualities we all possess and challenges people to express these qualities. Ultimately, a leader changes people. Again, we return to our analogy of leader-as-teacher, and we ask you to think about the teachers who have changed your life. Chances are they helped you to see more in yourself than you had seen before. They tapped something inside you that sparked new perceptions of yourself, new expectations of yourself; your ideals for yourself rose to a new level.

The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with "who," rather than "what," you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.