Quotes About Leadership

A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

When we think of a software architect, we think of someone who has power, and who commands respect.

Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It's the only way you can really get anything done.

Building trust is no longer a matter of creating structures and practices within a single culture.

The implication, in the minds of some, was that it certainly appeared that Fletcher wanted to be sure someone else was in change when the fatal blow struck his task force.

Overall, one gets the impression of a commander who was unsure of himself and consequently inconsistent. In other words, just about the worst kind of commander imaginable, although one blessed with uncanny luck.

Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin's personality very much mattered.

This was Lenin's doing. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

His followers, who are also typically his disciples, freely accept his leadership because they perceive him to be the possessor of extraordinary qualities or powers; and this "recognition" of his special qualification is seen by Weber as decisive for the validity of charisma.[

Confronted with urgent practical problems centering in the need to industrialize without delay, the collective party leadership shifted the center of gravity more to economics than to "culturalizing." The party debate on how best to build socialism in Russia turned largely into a debate about industrialization,

the 1917 Revolution was brought on by a long losing war in which an underequipped and poorly led Russian peasant army suffered an estimated seven million casualties in dead, wounded, and missing.

The point is that the powers on which he chiefly relied in exercising this forceful individual leadership were his powers of persuasion.

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

Does the mass give the leaders the program and its argumentation, or do the leaders give it to the mass?[163]

hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a writer and critic who assumed intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia in the fifties, had in 1848 confided to his diary the thought that Russia needed an autocracy that would champion the interests of the lower classes in order to realize future equality. He added: "Peter the Great acted thus, in my opinion, but such a power must realize that it is temporary, that it is a means, not an end."[10]

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

The portion of the "Letter to the Congress" kept secret at the time of writing remained unopened during the first few months after Lenin died. It was probably fortunate for Stalin's emotional equilibrium in those tense months that he continued in ignorance of the fact that Lenin had intended to unseat him from the post of general secretary. The blow was hard enough to sustain when it came.

Djugashvili had a way of leaving places under a cloud after some ugly incident, brought on in part by his own tendency to become embroiled with others.

Stalin was elected a member of the Secretariat and accorded the title "general secretary" in token of his seniority in a new secretarial trio whose two other members were Molotov and Kuibyshev. The base of operations was now securely in his possession.

To neither of his two commissariats did he give the sustained and imaginative direction that agencies so innovative in design especially called for. The notion of the worker-peasant inspectorate as essentially a public force against "bureaucratism" came from Lenin, and Stalin never seems to have felt at home with

whereas Lenin had envisaged the new Central Committee members as workers, for the most part, Stalin wanted to enlarge the Central Committee with well-disposed apparatchiki so as to increase his own influence within it.

Stalin was not temperamentally well constituted for success as an organizer and administrator.

During 1922 events moved swiftly toward a crisis in Lenin's relations with Stalin, who by this time felt sufficiently secure in his power base to assert views and persist in them even if they occasionally ran counter to Lenin's.