To me, leadership is about encouraging people. It's about stimulating them. It's about enabling them to achieve what they can achieve - and to do that with a purpose.
Interpretation
Leadership involves motivating and empowering others to reach their full potential with a clear purpose.
This quote by Christine Lagarde emphasizes that true leadership is not just about directing others, but rather about inspiring, stimulating, and empowering individuals to realize their capabilities. It highlights the importance of purpose in leadership, suggesting that guiding others towards meaningful goals is a key function of a great leader.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire a team to achieve their goals.
In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.
Tackling climate change is a collective endeavour, it means collective accountability and it's not too late
I have lived with extraordinary women, whether it was my grandmother, my mother. My father passed away when I was 16... I was witness to a woman who single handedly brought up the entire family and managed to do everything... She was an extraordinary role model for me.
I'm of those who believe that excesses in all matters are not a good idea, whether it's formation of bubbles, whether it's excess in the financial market, whether it's excess of inequality, it has to be watched, it has to be measured, and it has to be anticipated in terms of consequences.
You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.
Very often as a little girl, then as a young woman, I have suffered my lot of discrimination. I was brought up with brothers; I grew up in a boys' world. You have to elbow your way in. When you come with that sentiment of having been in a minority for a long period of time, then you are much more attentive to minorities.
My bosses cautioned me about my candor. Now my GE career is over, and I'm telling you that it was my candor that helped make it work.
When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.
He who finds a new path is a pathfinder, even if the trail has to be found again by others; and he who walks far ahead of his contemporaries is a leader, even though centuries pass before he is recognized as such.
I am not a party candidate, and if elected cannot be President of a party, but the President of the whole people.
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
If you're a set of guys looking to start a company, think about women you could team up with - they will see things differently and solve problems you didn't even realize you had.
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