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.

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Most quoted on leadership:

A people whom Providence hath cast together into one island or country are in effect one great body politic, consisting of head and members, in imitation of the body natural, as is excellently set forth in the statute of appeals, made 24 H. 8, c. 12, which stiles the King the supreme head, and the people a body politic (these are the very words), compact of all sorts and degrees of men, divided into spirituality and temporality. And this body never dies.

Robert Atkyns Trial of Sir Edward Hales (1686)

Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork, and boosts productivity. Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by—and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable—corner offices with excellent views.

Max Barry Company (2006)

Now the secret to successful managing is to break down your club. The first 15 guys you don't have to bother with. They are always playing and don't need the manager. The next five play only occasionally, so you got to keep buttering them up. The last five you gotta watch all the time because they're plotting to get you fired.

Casey Stengel

Two things are absolutely necessary in any leader or any person that aspires, wishes, to be a leader. That is moral compass and second is empathy. This candidate is void of both traits that are necessary for the stewardship of this country.

Khizr and Ghazala Khan Interview with CNN (2016)

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

Karl Marx