Quotes About Leadership

Boyd, borrowing from Sun Tzu, said the best commander is the one who wins while avoiding battle. The intent is to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse of the adversary by generating confusion, disorder, panic, and chaos. Boyd said war is organic and compared his technique to clipping the nerves, muscles, and tendons of an enemy, thus reducing him to jelly. As Boyd

Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

Barely six months after Ribbon Creek, Krulak had lost eleven Marines in another training accident. How he handled the incident is an example of the public relations axiom, "Tell the truth. Tell it all. And tell it quickly.

Krulak knew he would pay a price, and he still did the right thing. At a time when he had everything to lose, he was the only general in the American military whose sense of duty and love of country were greater than his careerism.

If you knew your job and you did your job, you could not have a better friend in the Corps than General Krulak.

Tigers breed tigers. A candy-assed commander will have few tigers working for him. Each makes the other uncomfortable.

They wanted to know about Commando Sabre.

Good CIOs are hard to find. Even if you can find one, it may take as much as a year for a CIO new to the company to learn the company environment and become an effective leader.

So the best project management policies are those that promote open flow of information up and down the project hierarchy.

Assigning best people to the project ("If they're easy to give up, they're the wrong people.")

Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.

We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.

Boldness and decision command, often even in evil, the respect and concurrence of mankind.

They are pretty good at improvising, but God help us if they are given time to think. Dean Atchison

JFK to RFK: To survive in politics, you sometimes have to be willing to make fun of yourself.

It was a telling point: Roosevelt met with Truman only twice during the eighty-two days of his fourth term, and their discussions were brief and perfunctory. Roosevelt apparently believed that his health problems would not cut short his life, or at least would not affect him before the war ended. Moreover, he didn't seem to think that Truman needed to know about the atomic bomb or postwar plans. This may

The search for the sources of his megalomania and a description of his personality seem useful primarily as a warning against future infatuations with leaders promising national salvation through emotionally appealing but rationally simplistic nostrums

They sat at the head of a wide round table

a female officer said. She also remained Seattle's only female homicide detective

John F. Kennedy that would begin to define him as a person and shape his future career choice. "To whom much is given, much is expected.

the brass and the bean counters look at the bottom line.

We must decide where we want our ministry to count—in the momentary applause of popular recognition or in the reproduction of our lives in a few chosen people who will carry on our work after we have gone. Really it is a question of which generation we are living for.

Having called his men, Jesus made a practice of being with them. This was the essence of his training program—just letting his disciples follow him.

Followers must have leaders, and this means that before much can be done with the church membership something will have to be done with the church officials.