Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The company was quite hierarchical. I often think it was like a pyramid with Robert at the top and lots of us paying homage to him. I try to turn the pyramid upside down so that I'm at the bottom and bubbling away and encouraging people and energizing them so that they are all empowered so that they can do what they need to do, now that's the dream.
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
Earn your leadership every day.
Every man should ask himself each day whether he is not too readily accepting negative solutions.
A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless... someone's got to make a wake up call.
One man's Poison Ivy is another Fellow's Spinach.
There are many qualities that make a great leader. But having strong beliefs, being able to stick with them through popular and unpopular times, is the most important characteristic of a great leader.
Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.
You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message.
Pride is the fuel of human accomplishment.
High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others.
Take the time and energy to manage your boss the same way you manage your team.
Great leaders motivate large groups of individuals to improve the human condition.
Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.
I can't explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health care facilities. This is something I rarely encountered during 38 years in uniform. And so I will not defend it because it is indefensible. But I can take responsibility for it and I do.
Leaders evoke emotional connections in followers only to the extent that the followers are emotionally needy.
True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
The wise leader settles for good work and then lets others have the floor.
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that 'a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.'
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization.
Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.
High performance leaders create an inspiring future by connecting with a classic and honorable past.
It's time for the US to widen its circle of learning, not to circle its wagons against hostile ideas in education reform.
On teacher education: induction into current mandates must not turn into seduction away from best practice.
As we seek to eliminate individualism in teaching, we should not eradicate individuality with it.
Students become good learners when they are in the classes of teachers who are good learners.
The Common Curriculum can easily become the karaoke curriculum, where everyone just follows the bouncing ball of the script.
"How" is what kills vision and dreams. Don't ask "How" until we figure out the "What". The "How" can kill the "What".
When you harness your leadership skill to your broken heart change happens.
We always have more ideas than we can fund.
Two primary ways to keep volunteers motivated - Food and T-shirts.
I believe in businesses where you engage in creative thinking, and where you form some of your deepest relationships. If it isn't about the production of the human spirit, we are in big trouble.
We blacks look for leadership in men and women of such youth and inexperience, as well as poverty of education and character, that it is no wonder that we sometimes seem rudderless.... We see basketball players and pop singers as possible role models, when nothing could be further, in most cases, from their capacities.
Influence is the key word in any definition of leadership.
One faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government, doesn't get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election.
American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves.
Leadership is creating a state of mind in others. The difference between being a leader and manager, all due respect to managers, is that leaders have to create states of mind. But a leader, first of all, has to have a clear state of mind, which is usually her own vision, which energizes her, motivates others, and then creates that state of mind in others.
Real obstacles don't take you in circles. They can be overcome. Invented ones are like a maze.
You take those little rascals, talk to them good, pat them on the back, let them think they are good, and they will go out and beat the biguns.
I'm no miracle man. I guarantee nothing but hard work.
We can't have two standards, one set for the dedicated young men who want to do something ambitious and one set for those who don't.
You have to learn what makes this or that Sammy run. For one it's a pat on the back, for another it's eating him out, for still another it's a fatherly talk, or something else. You're a fool if you think as I did as a young coach, that you can treat them all alike.
Leadership is something you earn, something you're chosen for. You can't come in yelling, 'I'm your leader!' If it happens, it's because the other guys respect you.
The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise.
What's emerging is a new synthesis of science, spirituality and leadership as different facets of a single way of being.
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.
A significant number of pages and sentences that the administration wants to keep in a classified status have already been released publicly, some of it by public statements of the leadership of the CIA and the FBI.
It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language. My definition isas follows: 1. Do what has to be done; 2. When it has to be done; 3. As well as it can be done; and 4. Do it it that way all the time.
It doesn't matter what anybody thinks of what I do. The clock doesn't lie.
The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.
Dare to go forward. Courage is the mark of greatness in leadership
I realised early on that there were two groups of people in the world: those who made the decisions and those who had the decisions made for them. I wanted to be one of the decision-makers.
The film looks suspiciously like the game itself!
Emotions are the glue that holds the cells of the organism together.
A serious athlete to me is one who is committed to excellence at any level, at any age, in any endeavor and in either sex. This commitment begins with a dream and a sense of talent and skill and determination to make that dream come true.
Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.
There are many reasons for why a man does what de does. To be himself he must be able to give it all. If a leader cannot give it all he cannot expect his people to give anything.
You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.
Presidents, leaders, to be effective have to represent the whole to the parts and to the world outside. They may live in the centre but they must not be the centre. To reinforce the common sense they must be a constant teacher, ever travelling, ever talking, ever listening, the chief missionary of the common cause.
Fortunately, God made all varieties of people with a wide variety of interests and abilities. He has called people of every race and color who have been hurt by life in every manner imaginable. Even the scars of past abuse and injury can be the means of bringing healing to another. What wonderful opportunities to make disciples!
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.
A low morality will not sustain leadership long, its influence quickly vanishes, it cannot produce its own succession.
If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.
We tend to select top men for their character and capacity, then overload them according to their willingness.
The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
Sport fosters many things that are good; teamwork and leadership.
I made a commitment... both to myself and to some supporters to carefully consider a run for the Liberal leadership for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
Large companies are not going to disappear. Multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees are not going to disappear. In fact, many of them are getting larger because they can benefit from economies of scale.
What's important now are the characteristics of the brain's right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields.
I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.
Doing the right thing isn't always easy - in fact, sometimes it's real hard - but just remember that doing the right thing is always right.
The worst type of employee you can have is one who has mentally quit and is still physically coming to work every day.
Successful people keep moving, even when they are discouraged and have made mistakes.
You have to escape from management land and get in touch with your people.
There is no 'grand conspiracy' preventing your from accomplishing what you need to do.
When you depend on another's perceptions to match your expectations, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
The truth is that problems won't just go away.
It is rare for people to say they want to be held accountable, but in reality, everyone wants everyone else to be held accountable.
Bucket filling is in the eye of the bucket holder, not the bucket filler. Fill their buckets with things that are important to them ... not you.
So much of life is about attitude and how we handle what life throws our way. Life is good - even when a situation appears to be the worst.
Your job is not to lower the bottom by adjusting for and accommodating the lowest-performing employees. You should be raising the top by recognizing and rewarding superstar behavior.
We all need people who will help us look at situations from a different perspective.
Successful charitable fund-raising has much in common with managing a business: It requires leadership, persistence, and creativity.
We're going to need to absorb some pain. The Republicans want to pile all the pain on people who can least afford it and the middle class and Democrats under his leadership want to make sure that we can address deficit reduction and continue to make investments and shared sacrifice is going to be imperative in order to be able to do that.
If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.
The five most important words a leader can speak are - 'I am proud of you' The four most important are - 'What is your opinion?' The three most important are - 'If you please' The two most important are - 'Thank You' And the most important single word of all is - 'You'
Leaders are like point guards, we set people up to score.
God has administered to us of the present age, a bitter draught and a harsh physician, on account of our abounding infirmities.
Leadership implies movement toward something and convictions provide that direction.
Leadership is an action, not a position.
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."
