Quotes About Leadership

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

Proactive people aren't pushy. They're smart, they're value driven, they read reality, and they know what's needed.

While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

In business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that successfully met consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive powerful leadership must constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right direction.

PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best part—their hearts and minds.

Quality begins with me. And I need to make my own decisions based on carefully selected principles and values.

Management, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It's more of an art; it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues.

In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.

The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." No

All of us are interested in things outside of our stewardships, and we should be, but the most important way to do anything about them is to magnify our own stewardships. When you focus on your own responsibility, you become relatively unconcerned with other peoples stewardships...The highest form of influence is to be a model, not a critic; a light, not a judge.

Our basic nature is to act, and not be acted upon. As well as enabling us to choose our response to particular circumstances, this empowers us to create circumstances. Taking initiative does not mean being pushy, obnoxious, or aggressive. It does mean recognizing our responsibility to make things happen.

Highly effective people do not really manage time—they manage themselves.

Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.

The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand our proactivity and to exercise personal leadership in our lives are imagination and conscience.

organizations are composed of people, and the more effective those people, the stronger the organization.

That leadership is primarily a function of who you are, for this is the foundation for everything you do. How do you build leaders? You first build character.

There might be exceptions—and if so, you might rethink their employment—but few people really want to be mediocre. Most of your team members want to make a valued contribution—to find purpose in their work.

Level 5 leaders display a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will, channelling their energy, drive, creativity and discipline in to something larger and more enduring than themselves.

no se puede pensar en términos de eficiencia cuando se trata de personas. Se piensa en términos de efectividad con la gente y de eficiencia con las cosas.

Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It doesn't begin and end with the writing of a personal mission statement. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things.