quotations about leadership
Leadership is about building people.
N. K. RANGANATH
The Hindu, April 20, 2016
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
This Side of Paradise
Good leadership is not obtained by issuing orders but by conviction and delegation--genuine leaders recognize and achieve agreement to an exciting and challenging vision.
GERHARD ZAPKE-SCHAUER
The Art of Leadership
People who are not leaders automatically gravitate toward lines--limitations set by others. Many people are taught this in kindergarten when they are instructed to stay within the lines while coloring. But leaders are more creative than that. They look for options and opportunities. They try to take things in a new direction, or beyond the limit. Progress and innovation are made by people who think without lines.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Developing the Leaders Around You
People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Developing the Leader Within You
Woe to the country which hath lost its leader; woe to the ship when its captain is no more.
TALMUD
A wise, right, and true estimate of one's own powers is necessary to their highest and best use. The general who overestimates his forces leads them to defeat; he who underestimates them does not lead them at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers -- wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO.
DANIEL GOLEMAN, RICHARD BOYATZIS & ANNIE MCKEE
Primal Leadership
Our faith in the value of leadership is durable--it survives, again and again, our disappointment with actual leaders.
JOSHUA ROTHMAN
"Shut Up and Sit Down", The New Yorker, February 29, 2016
Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
PETER F. DRUCKER
attributed, The Fundamentals of Leadership
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
attributed, Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity
You don't become an effective leader by default.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Leadership Gold
A leader must have the courage to act against an expert's advice.
JAMES CALLAGHAN
The Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1, 1986
Those who command themselves, command others.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.
COLIN POWELL
The Powell Principles
When there is danger, a good leader takes the front line; but when there is celebration, a good leader stays in the back of the room.
NELSON MANDELA
O: The Oprah Magazine, Apr. 2001
Leadership is the power of one harnessing the power of many.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Leadership Gold
The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.
HENRY MILLER
The Wisdom of the Heart
Man, like all other animals of a gregarious nature, is more inclined to follow than to lead. There are few who are endued with that impetus of soul which prompts them to stand foremost as leaders in the storming of the breach, whether it be of a fortress of stone, or the more dangerous one of public opinion, when failure in the one case may precipitate them on the sword, and in the other consign them to the scaffold.
FREDERICK MARRYAT
King's Own
Leadership is about mastering the fundamentals of the internal and external journey, the inner and the outer and using the head to conquer the heart. It is about self-transformation, self-correction and self-revelation. It is about correcting our defective vision by correcting ourselves. When we are able to accomplish this successfully, we are able to transform the pain of ignorance into the wisdom arising from understanding.
RAMNATH NARAYANSWAMY
"Leadership is self-transformation", Deccan Herald, April 20, 2016