Quotes About Leadership

Finally, power itself always exists in concentrated forms. In any organization it is inevitable for a small group to hold the strings. And often it is not those with the titles. In the game of power, only the fool flails about without fixing his target.

Place your iron hand inside a velvet glove.

The higher the rank, the greater the effect of the example. The men tend to feel no kind of contact with a commander who, they know, is sitting somewhere in headquarters. What they want is what might be termed a physical contact with him.

Occasional mistakes are inevitable—the world is just too unpredictable. People of power, however, are undone not by the mistakes they make, but by the way they deal with them.

Right from the beginning, your troops must see you leading from the front, sharing their dangers and sacrifices—taking the cause as seriously as they do. Instead of trying to push them from behind, make them run to keep up with you.

He increasingly spoke of himself in the third person, as if he had become an impersonal revolutionary force, and as such he was infallible. If he happened to mispronounce a word in a speech, every subsequent speaker from then on would have to pronounce it that way. "If I'd said it right," confessed one of his top lieutenants, "Stalin would have felt I was correcting him." And that could prove suicidal.

In searching, as you must, for the methods that will gain you the most power for the least effort, you will find the creation of a cultlike following one of the most effective.

Se existe um ideal a ser alcançado, deve ser o do guerreiro estratégico, o homem ou a mulher que administra situações difíceis e pessoas por meio de manobras hábeis e inteligentes.

Caesar set the ideal for all leaders and people of power. Like him, you must learn to enlarge your actions through dramatic techniques such as surprise

Daily Law: If you are too present and familiar, always available and visible, you seem too banal. You give people no room to idealize you. But if you are too aloof, people cannot identify with you. The Laws of Human Nature, 15: Make Them Want to Follow You—The Law of Fickleness

It is easy to be overwhelmed by everything that faces you in battle, where so many people are asking or telling you what to do.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by everything that faces you in battle, where so many people are asking or telling you what to do. So many vital matters press in on you that you can lose sight of your goals and plans; suddenly you can't see the forest for the trees.

Because humans are social creatures by nature, power depends on social interaction and circulation. To make yourself powerful you must place yourself at the center of things, as Louis XIV did at Versailles.

Muestra heroísmo para conseguir carisma de por vida. A la inversa, el menor signo de cobardía o timidez arruinará el carisma que tengas.

As women come to attain more leadership positions, this less obtrusive style of authority might begin to alter our perception of some of the dominance cues so long associated with power.

Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are

the source of their success (the various power players in history) could almost always be traced to one single skill or unique quality that separated them form the others.

There may be fewer mighty tyrants commanding the life and death over millions, but there remain thousands of petty tyrants ruling smaller realms, and enforcing their will through indirect power games, charisma, and so on. In every group, power is concentrated in the hands of one or two people, for this is one area in which human nature will never change: People will congregate around a single strong personality like planets orbiting a sun.

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely

Make yourself the flame and you will rise to the top. Since life is otherwise so full of unpleasantness and pleasure so scarce, you will be as indispensable as food and drink.

The best strategy is always to be very strong first in general, then at the decisive point.... There is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one's forces concentrated.... In short the first principle is: act with the utmost concentration. On War, Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831

Napoleón: cubrir tu mano de hierro con un guante de terciopelo.

Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. Instead they elicit contempt.

One last warning: Do not imagine that your master's dependence on you will make him love you. In fact, he may resent and fear you. But, as Machiavelli said, it is better to be feared than loved. Fear you can control; love, never.