Quotes About Leadership

It's going to be hard to stop this process. The generals are itching for a fight.134 They want to go." The message that Khrushchev took from Dobrynin's account was that if this crisis continued to escalate, Kennedy might well face a coup.

I believe that each leader was—contrary to his public declarations, and in Kennedy's case, secretly from almost all his advisors—determined, to the extent that he had control over events, not to go to war, not to permit armed conflict to arise between American and Soviet forces under any circumstances.

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was "very reasonable"—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.

The major in charge of this little collection of Quonset huts and planes in the hills controlled six and a half times World War II's worth of firepower.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.

Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.

He had an impeccable sense of timing, knew when to wait and when to move, and declared the state even before it was ready, because he knew that another opportunity might never arise. Not

Make no little plans they have no magic to stir men's blood...Make big plans, aim high in hope and work.

Jackson went from the professor's chair to the officer's saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.

decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day

The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.

E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1

Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices

Hire good people, and leave them alone.

This era doesn't call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.

We've always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on," Cannon-Brookes told me. "If you don't pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator.

He preserved the union and freed the slaves.

Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time," Collins wrote in Good to Great. "If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people?

If you're a boss, understand these two patterns and allow people to protect their peak

Does your boss allow you to do your best work?

management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leached into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives.

According to the research, the most effective executives deployed humor twice as often as middle-of-the-pack managers.

alongside the chairs in which his executives, marketing mavens, and software jockeys take their places, Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It's there to remind those assembled who's really the most important person in the room: the customer.