Quotes About Leadership

My interviews also imparted a sense to the interviewees of how significant the new job was to the company. When the CEO and global HR leader each take an hour to talk to you about a job you're interviewing for, that says something

Show some courage—be the leader you want to be. Without legacy issues hanging over your head, you'll be able to focus on building up your business to compete better and win, and you'll channel the money you save by resolving issues proactively back into the business. You won't reap all of the financial benefits—your successors will inherit them as well. What you will reap is a legacy; a reputation as a strong, transformational leader.

more leaders equals more bureaucracy. Leaders don't just lead—they create work for other people, in the form of meetings, sign-offs, projects, procedures, priorities, and so on, especially if they're good leaders. Others in the organization then spend more of their time responding to these leaders and less time leading or managing their own team members. Each leader has their own staff—adding yet more cost and complexity to the organization.

When you ask leaders to do more, and they deliver over both the short and long term, leading to wins for shareholders and customers, then those leaders deserve higher than average compensation.

Great leaders, I came to believe, challenge themselves and others to understand their businesses better and rethink them so that they can achieve two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. That same intellectual discipline—that mind-set of rigor and curiosity—allows leaders to master what is arguably the most important conflict of all: attaining strong short-term results while also investing in the future to achieve great long-term results.

My first and most enduring challenge as CEO was to dramatically improve the quality of both our individual thinking and our group discussions.

leadership boils down to three distinct tasks. First, leaders must know how to mobilize a large group of people. Second, they must pick the right direction toward which their team or organization should move. And third, they must get the entire team or organization moving in that direction to execute against that designated goal.

In truth, mobilizing people is only about 5 percent of the leader's job. The best leaders dedicate almost all their time to the latter two elements: making great decisions and executing consistently with those decisions.

In challenging other leaders intellectually, I strove specifically to push them beyond the incrementalism that usually exists inside organizations—the tendency to consider the short-term implications of a decision exclusively and to ignore the long term.

Not only did I spend time in advance of meetings generating some key questions for teams

Delegation and trust are of course vital—you can't do everything yourself, and you shouldn't try. That said, you don't want delegation to verge into a total abdication of authority on your part. You must verify that employees and the organization are actually executing as they are supposed to.

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.

You should always listen to your woman, and then make your own decision. If you choose to go with your woman's suggestion even when deep in your heart you feel that another decision is more wise, you are, in effect, saying, "I don't trust my own wisdom." You are weakening yourself by telling yourself this. You are weakening your woman's trust in you: why should she trust your wisdom if you don't?

Because a man's priority is his mission, he will always gravitate to a woman whom he feels would most support his mission.

a man with the power to punish anyone never hears anything except what he wants to hear. or, what's worse, what his subordinates think he wants to hear—and they don't dare ask him what it is.

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?

Little jobs require little men, and it's the little jobs that keep a kingdom running.

The queen sighed. What am I going to do with all of you now! You're going to let us continue our journey, Belgarath replied calmly. We'll argue about it, of course, but in the end that's the way it'll turn out. She stared at him. You did ask, after all. I'm sure you feel better now that you know.

Any fool can raise an army, but you start running into trouble around suppertime.

It's the way of kings.

We can try to act civilized and polite, but at the bottom of it all, the power of any ruler is based on a threat. Fortunately, we don't have to carry that threat out too often.

Why not hold an election?' I asked them. 'I've never had that much faith in elections,' Ran Horb said dubiously. 'An election's nothing more than a popularity contest, and popularity's hardly a measure of any kind of administrative ability.

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a belly-ache?' That's the major argument against any kind of absolutism.

see the Nimble Thief and the Man with Two Lives and the Blind Man, but I don't see the others. Where's the Dreadful Bear and the Knight Protector? The Horse Lord and the Bowman? And the ladies? Where are they—the Queen of the World and the Mother of the Race That Died?