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.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.
Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity.
The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership.
Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.
Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing.
What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.
Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.
I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn’t very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing.
The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.
Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.
Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.
Find the appropriate balance of competing claims by various groups of stakeholders. All claims deserve consideration but some claims are more important than others.
It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, ‘I guess you want my resignation?’ Watson said, ‘You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $10 million educating you!
The first step in becoming a leader, then, is to recognize the context for what it is – a breaker, not a maker; a trap, not a launching pad; an end, not a beginning – and declare your independence.
The ideal boss for a growing leader is probably a good boss with major flaws, so that one can learn all the complex lessons of what to do and what not to do simultaneously.
One thing Great Groups do need is protection. Great Groups do things that haven’t been done before. Most corporations and other traditional organizations say they want innovation, but they reflexively shun the untried. Most would rather repeat a past success than gamble on a new idea. Because Great Groups break new ground, they are more susceptible than others to being misunderstood, resented, even feared. Successful.