Quotes About Leadership

Strange, that Earthpeople always follow one who is not wise, but merely compelling.

Damn the torpedoes, Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed! (frequently erroreously quoted as 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead')

He is a very positive captain he is proactive as well as reactive. He is keen to read the game, to get in there, and he never stops thinking about the game, the situation, and trying to turn it to his advantage. He has been very good for the game.

This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to "kick them upstairs": promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else's problem.

In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organization itself.

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.

They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.'24

Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce

the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches)

Stewarship responsibility.

Achievement comes to someone when he is able to do great things for himself. Success comes when he develops leaders to do great things for him. But a legacy is created only when a person puts his organization into the position to do great things without him. -John C. Maxwell, The Twenty-one Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.

One of the greatest skills any leader can master is becoming comfortable with silence.

Roll-over Carthage and Babylon! With the auspicious embarrassment that only great nations can achieve, America's twenty-first century that began with that Holy Trinity of turdsqueak popcorn farts; George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama and Donald Trump, is now being awarded an involuntary colonoscopy without an anesthesia by Comatose Joe Biden and his assistant, Willie Brown's second or third string wifey, Camilla Harris.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

People will accept your idea more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

Send meeting materials in advance

We try to elevate the empowerment of our people over the organizational niceties of structure and process except to the extent that those structural and process features work to empower our people

Make sure meetings have clear goals, not just agendas, and ensure the goals are met. 4.

The Master leads by emptying people's minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know.

Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.

Fiddlesticks!" Rall replied. "These clodhoppers will not attack us, and should they do so, we will simply fall on them and rout them."58 (on describing that they had nothing to fear from the COlonists of New Jersey before the night of December 25, 1776; when Washington and his men crossed the Deleware.)

It was typical of Washington's style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone else's idea, rather than his own.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.