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Quotes about Leadership

Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be.  Become one yourself!

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180)
 
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“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

John Quincy Adams : American statesman (6th US president 1825-9)
John Quincy Adams (1767 - 1848)
 
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There is a place for each individual in the world, but you must seek and find where your place is and where you fit in. If you are afraid to take the responsibility of bringing in the new, do not try to stop those souls who are willing to do it. Realise that those souls who have been trained and inspired to undertake this task will do so, for it is their work. Find your rightful place in the whole vast plan, and if you are not in the front line do not let it disturb you. Remember, all sorts of people are needed to make up the whole. Simply accept your specific work and do what you know you have to do wholeheartedly, and allow those souls who have been placed in the position of leadership and responsibility to go ahead. Give them your full backing and complete loyalty; they need it and appreciate it. Lift up your heart in deep love praise and gratitude for them, and always give of your very best.

Eileen Caddy
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A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

Edward Paul Abbey : American writer & radical environmentalist
Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
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Grown men do not need leaders.

Edward Paul Abbey : American writer & radical environmentalist
Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
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To be sure, there are great spiritual teachers among us.  However, all are human, so they are vulnerable to all of the same temptations and corruptions as the rest of us.  Perhaps we would be better off viewing spiritual teachers as entertainers.  To see them otherwise, often leads to our surrendering our common sense and distorting our boundaries.  Leaders cannot mislead us for long.  It is we, the followers, who mislead ourselves.

Earon : Primate
Earon Davis
Source: Earon's notes
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Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution...

Colin Powell
 
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The best way to lead people into the future is to connect with them deeply in the present.

James Kouzes
Source: HBR article, "To Lead, Create a Shared Vision."
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The only way to get finished is to get started.

Charles Ray
Source: Things I Learned from My Grandmother About Leadership and Life (How to Light a Fire Under People Without Burning Them Out)
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Leadership is to invite people and build a strong team to reach the common goal. It produces more leaders in the end, not followers.

Stanton Fridie
 
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Initiating comes from imagination. An atmosphere where people initiate can only come from a place where dreaming is encouraged.

Leaders imagine a world that they would like to be a part of, a world worth fighting for. With this vision and all the emotion that gets stirred up in the heart, the leader begins to initiate. They see the issue or challenge that not everyone else sees and lead people to do something about it that was not done before.

Passion sparks initiative, a tremendous focus, belief, desire, and drive.

Seth Godin's Team
Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/TribesQA2.pdf
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A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.

Henry Kissinger (1923 - )
 
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I think any genuine leader today has to learn leadership the hard way—by doing it. That means embracing turbulence and crisis, not avoiding it. It means “flying through the thunderstorm.” That’s not to say that there are no basic principles to orient you to the challenge. Indeed, I describe some in the book. But there are no simple recipes. Until you have lived it, you don’t really know how to do it. That’s what I mean by “leadership the hard way.”

Dov Frohman : Gaia Explorer
Dov Frohman
Source: Why Leadership Is Like Flying Through a Thunderstorm: An Interview with Dov Frohman : http://www.leadershipthehardway.com/QandAwithDov.html
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Much like a pilot flying through a thunderstorm, in today’s economy leaders confront a situation of non-stop turbulence. Technology is constantly changing and innovation is continuous. Globalization is throwing up new competitors who seem to come out of nowhere. And, God knows, since 9/11, business people everywhere are far more aware of the impact of geopolitical turbulence in the form of terrorism, war, or big issues like climate change.

It is precisely these forces of increased turbulence that have fueled the growing preoccupation with leadership. In such an environment, leadership isn’t a luxury. It’s a matter of survival! Yet the very forces that make leadership more critical also make teaching it virtually impossible. What it takes to lead an organization through that turbulence isn’t simple or straightforward. There is just too much uncertainty. And it takes personal courage. You don’t really know what you will do at the moment of truth. No matter how much training you have (or how many leadership books you have read), nothing quite prepares you for that moment when you enter the eye of the storm!

Dov Frohman : Gaia Explorer
Dov Frohman
Source: Why Leadership Is Like Flying Through a Thunderstorm: An Interview with Dov Frohman : http://www.leadershipthehardway.com/QandAwithDov.html
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Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming. ... To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues and business partners. But that all came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream. By daydreaming, I mean loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind. ... In fact, I think daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, 'fuzzy' problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment. ... Daydreaming is an effective way of coping with complexity. When a problem has a high degree of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks being lost in them. ... Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up.

Dov Frohman : Gaia Explorer
Dov Frohman
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Most managers spend a great deal of time thinking about what they plan to do, but relatively little time thinking about what they plan not to do ... As a result, they become so caught up ... in fighting the fires of the moment that they cannot really attend to the longterm threats and risks facing the organization. So the first soft skill of leadership the hard way is to cultivate the perspective of Marcus Aurelius: avoid busyness, free up your time, stay focused on what really matters. Let me put it bluntly: every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. ... Only when you have substantial 'slop' in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem. Managers' typical response to my argument about free time is, 'That's all well and good, but there are things I have to do.' Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.

Dov Frohman : Gaia Explorer
Dov Frohman
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“I will live my life as an expression of the principles I believe in: empower, inspire, lead, learn, love, forgive, have faith and live.”

Karl Karl Martino
Source: http://www.paradox1x.org/html/mission.shtml
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Wrong location? Move it. Wrong people? Replace 'em. Wrong industry? I don't believe it. I've got a company in the machine tools industry, and we're doing great. I'd happily go into the coal business. It's how you look at something and how it's managed that make the difference.

Ken Hendricks : Gaia Child
Ken Hendricks
Source: Inc: Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20061201/entrepreneur-hendricks.html
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I've never found an important decision made by a great organization that was made at a point of unanimity. Significant decisions carry risks and inevitably some will oppose it. In these settings, the great legislative leader must be artful in handling uncomfortable decisions, and this requires rigor.

Jim Collins : Gaia Child
Jim Collins
Source: The Good to Great Pastor: An Interview with Jim Collins: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2006/002/7.48.html
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You could wait for the world to invite you to the banquet and the ball. Or you could just show up in your red dress and your headdress ready to boogie.

Tama Kieves
Source: This Time I Dance! - Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love
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Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Gaia Explorer
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece
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Your “true north” cannot be redirected by external pressures. Once you start trying to satisfy one shareholder, you’ll have to deal with another shareholder with a different point of view. Same with board members and all your other constituencies. If you allow yourself to be pulled off course, you’re going to destroy your enterprise.

Bill George : Gaia Explorer
Bill George
Source: The Thought Leader Interview: Bill George: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/07409
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The leader’s job today, in 21st-century terms, is not about gaining followership. Followership is an outmoded notion. Leadership starts with gaining alignment with the mission and values of the organization: What are we about? What do we believe as a group? Goldman Sachs, where I serve on the board, has achieved solid alignment around its mission: “The clients’ interests always come first.” At Medtronic, we aligned around the idea of “allevi­ating pain, restoring health, and ex­tending life.” It was clear that anyone who didn’t buy into that could work somewhere else.

Bill George : Gaia Explorer
Bill George
Source: The Thought Leader Interview: Bill George: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/07409
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The most important thing about leadership is your character and the values that guide your life.

Brenda Barnes : Gaia Explorer
Brenda Barnes
Source: Book Excerpt: "True North": http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/311/true-north.html
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Gandhi and Mandela and Churchill and JFK and Reagan and Thatcher and Sarkozy and Franklin and Washington set the tone to an incredible degree—their "personal style" was their "brand." ("It" starts with personal style of the tip-top leadership team. Sorry to be politically insensitive, but who would give a hoot about Tibet if it weren't for the look and style of the Dalai Lama?) Boss at any level: You're either on the "it" boat—or not.

Thomas J. "Tom" Peters : US author, lecturer, mgmt consultant; coauthored best-seller, In Search of Excellence
Tom Peters (1942 - )
Source: 67 Random Thoughts on Design: http://www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/010419.php
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Human nature always defeats a big idea about how to change human nature... In the battle between company policy and human nature, human nature always wins.

Rodd Wagner
Source: 12: The Elements of Great Managing
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I'd always rather err on the side of openness. But there's a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call. The art of leadership is knowing how much information you're going to pass on -- to keep people motivated and to be as honest, as upfront, as you can. But, boy, there really are limits to that.

Warren Bennis : Gaia Explorer
Warren Bennis
Source: An Interview with Warren Bennis: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/18276
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Great Groups are vivid Utopias. They are a picture of the way organizations ought to look -- sort of like a set of aspirations and a graphic illustration of what's possible. So how do we, in our mundane, quotidian organizations, create these things? I think there are a number of factors that we can look at.

Perhaps the key factor, and it's almost a banal thing to say, is finding a meaning in what you do. That is, how do you make people feel that what they're doing is somewhat equivalent to a search for the Holy Grail?

This is more than just having a vision. You can see the difference in the often-cited way in which Steve Jobs brought in John Sculley to take over Apple. At the time, Sculley was destined to be the head of Pepsico. The clincher came when Jobs asked him, "How many more years of your life do you want to spend making colored water when you can have an opportunity to come here and change the world?"

Warren Bennis : Gaia Explorer
Warren Bennis
Source: An Interview with Warren Bennis: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/18276
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Without a terrific leader, you're not going to have a Great Group. But it is also true that you're not going to have a great leader without a Great Group.

Warren Bennis : Gaia Explorer
Warren Bennis
Source: An Interview with Warren Bennis: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/18276
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How would you describe the leaders of great groups?
He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Ironically, the leader is able to realise his or her dream only if others are free to do exceptional work. Typically, the leader is the one who recruits the others, by making the vision so palpable and seductive that they see it, too, and eagerly sign up. Inevitably, the leader has to invent a leadership style that suits the group. The standard models, especially command and control, simply don't work. The heads of groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily. They have to make decisions without limiting the perceived autonomy of the other participants. Devising and maintaining an atmosphere in which others can put a dent in the universe is the leader's creative act.

Warren Bennis : Gaia Explorer
Warren Bennis
Source: INTERVIEW WITH WARREN BENNIS: http://www.managementskills.co.uk/articles/ap98-bennis.htm
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