Quotes About Leadership

Gotham may have lost its king and queen, Bruce, but it could still have its prince

I quoted both Miranda Fleet AND Gandhi.

Why is it so important to attack your competitors during a tornado instead of serve your customers? Why, specifically, was Larry Ellison once quoted as saying, citing Genghis Khan, "It is not enough that we win—all others must lose"?

They will work with vendors who have little or no funding, with products that start life as little more than a diagram on a whiteboard, and with technology gurus who bear a disconcerting resemblance to Rasputin.

existing ones. At the same time, it needs to separate its revenue performance activities from its enabling investments, focusing the former on delivering results based on what the latter have helped to seed and till. As the following diagram indicates, these two divisions result in four zones of management activity, each aligned with one, and only one, investment horizon, each demanding a different style of leadership to achieve those ends.

The competition takes place at the level of corporate agenda, not at the level of competing products. That

Pioneers are people with arrows in their backs")

The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary focuses on value not from a system's technology per se but rather from the strategic leap forward such technology can enable.

This material focuses primarily on marketing, because that is where the leadership must come from

you get installed by the pragmatists as the leader, and from then on, they conspire to help keep you there.

The company failed because its managers were unable to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even when the company name on the check reads the same. Thus, at a time of greatest peril, when the company was just entering the chasm, its leaders held high expectations rather than modest ones, and spent heavily in expansion projects rather than husbanding resources.

Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, good fit with your crown jewels. If

The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question — did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill — will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century.

Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be "the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went," he said. "I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists," he said. "And then I want 'em to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home.

My God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table because, basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause, that, good God, we want them over in Paris. We've got to get them to Paris or you can't have peace….I just want you to know, I'm not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I mean I'll only do what you and Rusk want me to do, but I'll do anything…

This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.

The ability to inspire rather than enforce loyalty is a critical quality of leadership.

major in the 1st Division added. That major always took a large number of shirkers for granted, relying throughout on that "certain number of men who can be depended upon, as a general thing, to begin and end all military operations.

Churchill that he had a great many military ideas, most of them likewise bad.

he had died as late as the New Year of 1939, he would, as Paul Addison says, 'perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics'. Certainly until his apotheosis he was more often seen as an 'interesting failure' than as the subject for a study in greatness.

Although Churchill hadn't been the only sponsor of the doomed Gallipoli enterprise, he had played a leading role, and not even an honest one at times. In any case, the old saying goes that success has many parents but failure is an orphan, and Gallipoli had become a one-parent child.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

The people are that part of the state that does now know what it wants.

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools.