Quotes About Leadership

Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. He writes that in order to have mutual trust, you need to be vulnerable.

In ten years, I'm certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn't intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

During the meeting and the subsequent resolution, we should explicitly disallow the phrases "would have" or "could have," as they are counterfactual statements that result from our human tendency to create possible alternatives to events that have already occurred.

While the redshirts battle to contain the raging engine fire that is threatening the entire ship, the bridge officers continue to cover their asses,

It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.

Are we playing to win and to establish the technical supremacy we need to keep up with what the business needs, or do we just keep limping along, shackled to things built decades ago, and tell our business leadership to throw in the towel and stop having good ideas?

A fellow NCO in the Marines once told me that his priorities were the following: provider, parent, spouse, and change agent. In that order.

where mistakes are routinely punished and scapegoats fired. Punishing failure and "shooting the messenger" only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

how we design our organization dictates how work is performed, and, therefore, the outcomes we achieve. Throughout

I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.

Creating and prioritizing work inside a department is hard. Managing work among departments must be at least ten times more difficult.

Erik described the relationship between a CEO and a CIO as a dysfunctional marriage. That both sides feel powerless and held hostage by the other.

We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do!

Solving any complex business problem requires teamwork, and teamwork requires trust.

As has been proven time and again, the further the distance between the person doing the work (i.e., the change implementer) and the person deciding to do the work (i.e., the change authorizer), the worse the outcome.

My guys wanted to call it "Cujo" or "Stiletto." But the developers wanted to call it "Unicorn." Unicorn? Like rainbows and Care Bears? And against all my expectations, "Unicorn" wins the vote. Developers. I'll never understand them.

You're right that you can't achieve the strategic until you've mastered the tactical,

We can outsource the work but not the responsibility.

As Sensei W. Edwards Deming once observed, 'a bad system will beat a good person every time.

For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.

CIO stands for "Career Is Over." And VPs of IT Operations don't last much longer.

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

You can't just throw the pig over the wall to us, and

provider, parent, spouse, and change agent.