You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
Trust is difficult to define, but we know when it’s present and when it’s not.
A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people’s lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.
Listening to the inner voice – trusting the inner voice – is one of the most important lessons of leadership.
Leaders are people who do the right thing: managers are people who do things right. Both roles are crucial, but they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing wrong things well.
Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.
Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.
The manager administers; the leader innovates.
Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.
The future has no shelf life.
A passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purposes of work and human organisations.
Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.
If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.
Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions.
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.
Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback.
Don’t over-react to the trouble makers.