Quotes About Leadership

Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.

The future is a matter of contempt for those with courage. - Napoleon Bonaparte.

I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon

Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow." ' Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962

I have beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am a little tired.

If you make war,' he would say to General d'Hédouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.'79

The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,' he later wrote in The World Crisis; 'the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.'45

Vanniv put a hand over his chest. "I don't know what you're implying, madam professor, but I have a strict 'no attacking cities' policy.

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job.

The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.

The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.

we confused the manager's general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.

delegation without follow-through is abdication.

The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

if you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself

Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or "flattened" the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.

When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it.

The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.

Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.

one of the manager's key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: •  What decision needs to be made? •  When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? •  Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? •  Who will ratify or veto the decision? •  Who will need to be informed of the decision?

information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which is why I choose to spend so much of my day doing it.

a strong and positive corporate culture is absolutely essential if dual reporting and decision-making by peers are to work.

The second idea is that the work of a business, of a government bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams.