Quotes About Leadership

One day the king asked West whether Washington would be head of the army or head of state when the war ended. When West replied that Washington's sole ambition was to return to his estate, the thunderstruck king declared, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.

Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.

when John Rockefeller dies," Archbold said, "the world is going to be surprised to learn what a very great man he has been in every way.

Archbold] was a man of imagination, of courage, of great persuasiveness, with a genius for reading men and dealing with them.

Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.

Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy.

For many years, Rockefeller had tried to free himself from details and applauded the committee system as relegating him to a fifth wheel.

Two people seemed to coexist inside George Washington's breast. One was the political militant who mouthed republican slogans; this Washington thought his troops would fight better if motivated by patriotic ideals. The other, schooled in the British military system, believed devoutly in top-down discipline and rank as necessary to a well-run army. This Washington was also the Virginia planter who felt little in common with the scruffy plebeians around him.

When the sixty-nine electors met on February 4, 1789, they voted unanimously for Washington, who became the first president, and cast only thirty-four ballots for Adams, who came in second and thus became vice president.

grooming sons to inherit their respective businesses.

He was respectful toward his superiors but never awed by them and was always aware of their shortcomings.

He had long bewailed his inability to delegate authority—"It is my nature and I cannot help it

Beyond the size of his stake, Rockefeller also possessed an unlikely charisma

Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances: "May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?"21 For the admiring Douglass, Grant was "the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.

but Rockefeller started at the top, believing that if he could crack his strongest competitor first, it would have a tremendous psychological impact.

Rockefeller always sees a little further than the rest of us—and then he sees around the corner.

he would reorganize bankrupt roads and transfer control to himself.

John Adams said that if Washington "was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.

So why did Rockefeller stick to his self-defeating silence?

in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.

Washington was then unanimously elected president of the convention.

Imagining that the companies would be quite lucrative, Washington had no qualms about businessmen booking large profits as long as their work served the public weal and provided a model for future government action.

a general marches at the head of his troops," so should wise politicians "march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to wait the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken ought to produce the event.

This early experience made Grant tend to view war as a hard-luck saga of talented, professional soldiers betrayed by political opportunists plotting back in Washington.