Quotes About Leadership

When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.

Executive leadership ultimately goes to the candidate wearing the biggest codpiece. I

The first step is making sure you, as the Top, do, in fact, know what the hell you're doing.

You decide the name for the new country! You who have watched over us from the beginning!

To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.

With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.

recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one "leadership competency" of the future.

Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.

On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.

if our ward and stake leaders were to focus on leading their members to share the gospel, many of the other problems that fester in our hearts and homes, and in our wards and stakes, would resolve themselves through the blessings that come from accepting the call that God has given each of us to be missionaries.

There had, therefore, to be a reason why good managers consistently made wrong decisions when faced with disruptive technological change.

In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers. Passive

Clayton M. Christensen

Clayton M. Christensen

Managers whose organizations are confronting change must first determine that they have the resources required to succeed. They then need to ask a separate question: does the organization have the processes and values to succeed?

As such, while senior managers may think they're making the resource allocation decisions, many of the really critical resource allocation decisions have actually been made long before senior management gets involved: Middle managers have made their decisions about which projects they'll back and carry to senior management—and which they will allow to languish.

When managers assign employees to tackle a critical innovation, they instinctively work to match the requirements of the job with the capabilities of the individuals whom they charge to do it.

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.

If we can't see beyond what's close by, we're relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.

Incompetence, bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, and short-term investment horizons obviously have played leading roles in toppling many companies.

the firms that led the industry in every instance of developing and adopting disruptive technologies were entrants to the industry, not its incumbent leaders.

One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

Managers who confront disruptive technological change must be leaders, not followers, in commercializing disruptive technologies.

that leadership is more crucial in coping with disruptive technologies than with sustaining ones, and that small, emerging markets cannot solve the near-term growth and profit requirements of large companies.