Quotes About Leadership

If managers focus only on short-term results, they are often justified in continuing to intervene to sustain results.

To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.

Rather than pushing harder to overcome resistance to change, artful leaders discern the source of the resistance. They focus directly on the implicit norms and power relationships within which the norms are embedded.

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, 'I've been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it's been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We're fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

Lastly, vision is not a solution to a problem. If it is seen in that light, when the "problem" of low morale or unclear strategic direction goes away, the energy behind the vision will go away also. Building shared vision must be seen as a central element of the daily work of leaders.

we must allow multiple visions to coexist, listening for the right course of action that transcends and unifies all our individual visions. As one highly successful CEO expressed it: "My job, fundamentally, is listening to what the organization is trying to say, and them making sure that it is forcefully articulated.

It's just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

The more willing you are for him to make a free choice, the freer he will feel. This can be especially difficult with subordinates, who are often conditioned to feel as though they must go along. But you can still help by creating the time and safety for them to develop their own sense of vision.

That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.

leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization.

Without effective local line leaders, new ideas—no matter how compelling—do not get translated into action, and the intentions behind change initiatives from the top can easily be thwarted. Network

it is no surprise that extraordinary leaders, like Mieko Nishimizu and Roger Saillant, often have deep personal stories of moments of awakening, when some old part of them died and a new part emerged.

As Winston Churchill once said, "The Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

This Republican takeback of Capitol Hill would immediately

Georgina are our two consultation advisers, counsellors, then there's Dr Alex Lukas, the medical director, and Nurse Louise Griffiths.' 'What's Julian Harwood's role?' 'Mr Harwood? He's managing director of the whole group. But we never see him. I mean, he

Machiavelli declared that it was better to be feared than loved as a leader, but you did not want to be hated. Hatred led to conspiracy. And conspiracy, he warned, could bring down governments.

In Washington, it is far more important to be feared than loved.

Raising money is what helps an ambitious member of the House rise in the ranks far more than ideas or competence.

Throw Them All Out

But the problem is not just with accumulated power, but also with those who seek it. As scientist and author David Brin pointedly noted, "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible.

You have to catch people making mistakes and make it so that it's cool. You have to make it undesirable to play it safe.

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don't try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. "You can't put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product," Bezos will say.

The abbot, perhaps, of a prosperous and deeply tanned order.

But he lacked a sense of urgency at key periods, and lacked a firm hand when one was sometimes called for. His greatest strength may have proved his greatest flaw—one that finally sunk John Jacob Astor's West Coast empire. Wilson Price Hunt vastly preferred cooperation to confrontation.