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Leadership Quotes

A small page, and a mixed one. It is split between novelists and management writers, so you will find Henry Miller and Tom DeMarco on the same list. Miller, in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941): “The real leader has no need to lead — he is content to point the way.” DeMarco, in Peopleware (1987): “The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”

Thomas J. Watson, in 1939, put it in terms of discipline: nothing proves a man’s ability to lead others as much as what he does from day to day to lead himself. The line about leadership being a mix of strategy and character, credited to General Norman Schwarzkopf, is marked disputed.

Random quote on Leadership

Most quoted on leadership:

O Richard! O my king!
The universe forsakes thee!

Michel-Jean Sedaine

Many times leaders have one agenda, followers have another.

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin Anarchism and the Black Revolution (1993)

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

John Quincy Adams

'Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.

Michel de Montaigne

I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control managing. But I can't prove that. And there are no models.

Marvin Bower The Will to Manage (1966)

The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate.

Akio Morita Made in Japan (1986)

As for the employees, the payment in stock options revives, somewhat ironically, the old anarchist ideology of self-management of the company, as they are co-owners, co-producers, and co-managers of the firm.

Manuel Castells The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)

The king is so visible that he is almost too responsible for everything: the republic, a collectivity that cannot be responsible for anything, serves as a nickname for everybody and nobody, a good-for-nothing and destructive anonymity.

Charles Maurras For a French Awakening (1943)

Deception is the knowledge of kings.

Cardinal Richelieu

What is a king? a man condemn'd to bear
The public burthen of the nation's care.

Matthew Prior

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Henry Miller The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)

A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates

Peter Drucker Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless … someone's got to make a wake up call.

Warren Bennis Reinventing Leadership : Strategies to Empower the Organization (2005)

What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretence that the decision was based on reason.

Robert Harris Pompeii (2003)

One can lead a nation only by helping it see a bright outlook. A leader is a dealer in hope.

Napoleon Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

John Kenneth Galbraith The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish.

Sam Walton

The king reigns but does not govern.

Otto von Bismarck

The rule
Of the many is not well. One must be chief
In war and one the king.

Homer

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