Quotes About Leadership

Lenin added a postscript on January 4, 1923, recommending Stalin's removal from the post of general secretary.

There is no indication that he thought of himself as a "machine politician" in our sense of that phrase.

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

Before long, however, Djugashvili was organizing one or more new study circles of which he himself was the mentor.[129] Again, a quality by which he was distinguished in later years—the urge for personal power—was finding expression in the seminary period.

succession means legitimacy as well as power.

It involves the passage to the new leader of something of the authority possessed by his predecessor, the general recognition of him as rightful head of the political community.

But the situation is very different—and the succession problem far more difficult—in a new state in which supreme authority is centered in the personality of the leader-founder, and in which no formal office of supreme leader has been created.

Lenin's personal charisma was neither institutionalized in an office of supreme party leadership (as we have already noted, he had held none), nor was it easily transferable to a successor. No one among the leaders of the party succeeded to Lenin's extraordinary authority.

Earlier in the year, Trotsky had been shipped into exile in Turkey. Organized opposition was now at an end. The struggle for leadership was over, and Stalin was the victor. As if to mark this fact and formalize the outcome, his fiftieth birthday, on December 21, 1929, was officially celebrated with great fanfare. The party, over which the Stalin faction reigned supreme, saluted him on that occasion as Lenin's successor—the new vozhd'.

Two years after his death, by which time Stalin was far along in his march to power, the succession problem was still unresolved. Stalin delivered the political report of the Central Committee before the Fourteenth Congress, appearing in a role that had traditionally been Lenin's and that Zinoviev had taken at the two preceding party congresses. But he was not an acknowledged new supreme leader of the party with authority in any way comparable to Lenin's.

July 1900, several months after completing the term of exile, he went abroad again and entered the recently founded Russian Social Democratic Workers' party's leadership as one of the editors of Iskra (The Spark)—a new foreign-based party organ that he himself had done much to organize.

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.

There's very little that Idi Amin and Newt Gingrich have in common, but they both used words to shape how people think about things without regard for the truth.

Politicians play on our fears to manipulate us.

Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy, and make a point of putting him in your service.

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527

The leader who tries to change the group's spirit directly—yelling, demanding, disciplining—actually plays into the teenage dynamic and reinforces the desire to rebel.

So after that I had a new rule. If I'm hired by the plant engineer, I only go over his head if I'm in project failure mode. If the project is going to fail, then I'll go over his head. But as long as the project is going to come out, I never go over his head. Now, that's a rule I still follow today.

50 Cent is a master player at power, a kind of hip-hop Napoleon Bonaparte.

Powerful people never waste time. Outwardly they may play along with the game — pretending that power is shared among many — but inwardly they keep their eyes on the inevitable few in the group who hold the cards. These are the ones they work on. When troubles arise, they look for the underlying cause, the single strong character who started the stirring and whose isolation or banishment will settle the waters again.

the powerful are often reluctant to take advice

The men who have changed the universe have never gotten there by working on leaders, but rather by moving the masses. Working on leaders is the method of intrigue and only leads to secondary results. Working on the masses, however, is the stroke of genius that changes the face of the world. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821

Some people, too, are inveterately passive: they are waiting for you to make the bold move, and if you don't, they will think you are weak.