Quotes About Leadership

don't know. I've found that people in power can be incredibly insulated and therefore unrealistic about what they can accomplish.

Sayin' goes, those who did the most talk the least and vice versa.

Garfield fought side by side with African Americans during the Civil War; and after the War, he worked side by side with America's first African American congressmen to pass those early civil rights bills.

In short, if God-fearing citizens are not involved at the ballot box, God-fearing leaders will not be elected, God-honoring policies will not be enacted, and the respective city, state, or nation will not be blessed by God.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Thus

To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me.

While Hall was taking it upon himself to re-arrange the leadership of the navy, and shuffle the cabinet, he was also perfecting the art of the intelligence dirty trick. He created his own fake code book, to be used only at a time of national crisis – called the Secret Emergency War Code – and had it sold to the Germans by a representative in Rotterdam for £500.

It was Churchill himself who described Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, as "the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon".

It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.

There was a time, in living memory, when this nation bestrode the planet like a titan.

In the early twentieth century, when John D. Rockefeller was petitioning Congress for a charter to create the first foundation, a top nonprofit leader of that time, Edward Devine, argued the charter should only be granted if public officials had some say over the selection of board members. The idea never went anywhere and has rarely been raised since. Foundations answer only to themselves.

At Honeywell, we asked business leaders to think not just about the next five years when they presented strategic plans, as they traditionally did, but also to craft the following fiscal year's plan.

Most companies have succession plans for their leadership ranks, but it devolves into a rote exercise, and the organization lacks a clear sense of who will fill key roles in case of departure. It's another instance of what I call "compliance with words rather than compliance with intent.

I often quoted a popular Chinese proverb when addressing our leaders: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you'll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company's strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

Just as you're pushing for more efficiency throughout the organization via process change, you can also keep your organization increasingly slender and nimble as you grow by maintaining a leadership corps that is relatively small and stable but that punches far above its weight.

people sometimes use teamwork as an excuse for suppressing dissenting opinions.

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

we made a practice of publicizing internally the top ten and bottom ten performers on HOS. Leaders and teams liked placing in the top ten, but they absolutely detested being publicly identified as a bottom-ten performer. This tactic helped generate a sense of urgency around HOS, raising performance across the entire organization. In fact, I recommend using this tactic whenever you're trying to change anything in an organization.

Regarding a prospective company's position in its industry, think hard about whether you might roll up multiple players in a fragmented industry to create a juggernaut. When we entered the gas detection business, there were no big players, but over an eight-year period we were able to acquire several companies, roll them up into a single Honeywell business, and become number one in the industry.

When both introducing and sustaining change, leadership matters. The organization needs to see that you, personally, are taking this seriously. As we rolled out HOS, I talked about its importance for our business at every opportunity. I held regular meetings to make sure we were actually implementing it and that we were getting the results—something I didn't do for Six Sigma, and a reason it underdelivered.

Too many leaders expect their people to adapt to their particular leadership style. If you want the best performance, look beyond your style and provide feedback tailored to the individual.

Criticizing privately might be appropriate in certain, sensitive cases, but in general both criticism and praise should be public. Your people have to understand that certain behaviors or performance are unacceptable. Otherwise they'll wonder why the organization allows it. When leaders share both criticism and praise publicly, team members learn about the high performance culture you're striving to create.

When it came to monetary compensation, we didn't hesitate to pay our leaders above market.