Quotes About Leadership

A movement exists to create change while a party strives to govern.

President Barack Obama's observation that the prime minister had "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new," Putin said, "We don't spread our legs.

The plan, ostensibly, was for Medvedev to sit out his four years doing nothing but talking pretty, and then to cede the throne to Putin, this time for two consecutive six-year terms.

And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him.

On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

You asked about the Avengers. Y'wanna know the best part about being an Avenger? Having Captain America around you all the time. He just—the guy just brings out the absolute best in people. You want to be good when he's around. You really do. Ivan, look around you real quick. Because right now? Captain America ain't here.

So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?

Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.

This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.

Every class is unfit to govern.' The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.

a person who is free to make a $20,000 purchase of a car as a customer, might not be free to buy an office chair for $500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small ones (firms whose chief executives attend the annual World Economic Forum schmooze-fest in Davos tend to underperform the stock market), and big public bodies have worse reputations than small ones.

Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

George Washington said that 'Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.

Let your life be guided by greatness

I have both held and beheld unlimited power and of it I know but one thing. It drives men mad.' - Alexander the Great

His actions had saved three US cities from annihilation but only a few very high-ranking people knew it. Fairfax was just pleased he could still wear jeans and sneakers to work.

The parallel is inescapable: General Scott is Cortés, and General Santa Anna is Montezuma; the two acts of surrender in Mexico City echo, illuminate, and legitimize each other, representing resonant moments in the march of progress that is "American" history.

In order to be as effective as possible, we need to consciously design our teams rather than merely allow them to form accidentally or haphazardly.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

We like to think that Team Topologies is another piece of this puzzle—in particular, having clear and fluid team structures, responsibilities, and interaction modes.