Quotes About Leadership

Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

Yes, America must do the right thing, but to provide moral leadership, America must do it in the right way, too.

They that walk, walk with many. They that run, run with few. But those that fly, fly alone.

Using guilt is not productive. Appealing to the greatness of others is what works for Warren, and it will work for you.

A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.

We can have an American president who does not govern with negativism and fear of the future.

designate two or three days each month as "X" days, during which they wouldn't schedule any meetings. I'd spend some of those days alone thinking about our businesses.

I'd also designate twelve additional days as "growth days," holding intensive sessions with leadership teams to help them think through various growth or operations initiatives.

We had to scrub our books and practices so that they reflected the reality of our underlying businesses. We also had to shake our executives out of their blinding fixation on quarterly results. Only then could we make planning decisions that supported long-term growth.

As I like to say, it's important to be right at the end of a meeting, not at the beginning.

Demand that your people pursue two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. Make it your mission to understand the nuances of your businesses so that you can shape and guide your teams' intellectual inquiry. Allocate your time thoughtfully; don't become a victim of your calendar. Carve out time to read, research, and think. Turn your meetings into vigorous, instructive debates.

As the decision-maker in your organization, you must become intimately engaged with leadership development, hiring, and firing.

one of the leader's most valuable but least valued contributions is avoiding trouble, not addressing it once it's occurred).

In my first three years as CEO, we wound up changing out about half of my staff members, replacing them with leaders who bought in strongly to One Honeywell.

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there are just 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate for almost three hundred million people.

Thanks to Blair's catastrophically invertebrate decision to agree to a cut in Britain's EU budget rebate, we now pay far too much into the EU compared to other countries. It's time for our politicians to start negotiating with the EU by showing a bit of backbone rather than already starting as hopeless losers.

Brown inherited a growing economy, low inflation and rising tax revenues. If he had just done nothing, or stayed in bed, or taken up Scottish country dancing full time, or gone on holiday for the rest of his life and not meddled with the economy, he would have gone down in history as one of Britain's greatest ever chancellors.

Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.

systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.

The usefulness of an elder will depend in the long run more on his character than on his gifts and knowledge.

And it was telling that it took forty-three years to rebuild the single bridge across the Liffey after it collapsed in 1385, and that it was the abbot of St Mary's Abbey, not the justiciar or the merchants, who eventually oversaw the construction of what was the first fully stone bridge.

I've known a lot of political figures but never another one whose self-control seemed so fragile.

A good officer can get away with being wrong, but he can't be indecisive.