Quotes About Influence

Emotional volatility is not the most reliable leadership tool. When you get angry, you are usually out of control. It's hard to lead people when you've lost control. You may think you have a handle on your temper, that you can use your spontaneous rages to manipulate and motivate people. But it's very hard to predict how people will react to anger.

Leadership is not about me. It is all about them.

But there's a difference between being an achiever and a leader. Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.

All other things being equal, your people skills (or lack of them) become more pronounced the higher up you go. In fact, even when all other things are not equal, your people skills often make the difference in how high you go.

If your successor truly wants to become a great CEO, she needs to recognize that there is no "off" switch when she is around the people who she will be leading.

It's an interesting equation: Less me. More them. Equals success.

We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us.

A lowly clerk expressing an opinion doesn't get people's notice at a company. But when the CEO expresses that opinion, everyone jumps to attention. The higher up you go, the more your suggestions become orders.

Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.

If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.

Peter Drucker, who said, "Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.

To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.

Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.

You know your vote doesn't count, but you go through the motions, because it's been drummed into your head that you might be the one person who makes a difference.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

'Money talks' because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge.

Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.