Leadership Quotes

LEADERSHIP – helping others innovate

 “Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.” Warren Bennis (1925 – present) University of Southern California professor and leadership expert

 “A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.” Robert Reich (1946 – present) University of California Berkley professor, author, former US Labor Secretary

 “Leaders must wake people out of inertia. They must get people excited about something they’ve never seen before, something that does not yet exist.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1943 – present), Harvard Business professor and change management expert

 “Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”  Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) author and management consultant

 “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) author and management consultant

 “The man who gets the most satisfactory results is not always the man with the most brilliant single mind, but rather the man who can best coordinate the brains and talents of his associates.” W. Alton Jones (1891 – 1962) American industrialist and former CEO of CITGO

“A study at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management found that compassion and building teamwork will be two of the most important characteristics business leaders will need for success a decade from now.”  Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer, authors and founders of HeartMath LLC

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you will help them to become what they are capable of being.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1842), German writer