Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't be willing to do yourself.
Interpretation
Leaders should set an example by being willing to undertake the same tasks they ask of others.
This quote emphasizes the importance of leading by example in a leadership role. It suggests that a leader should demonstrate the same commitment and willingness to engage in the work expected of their employees, fostering a culture of shared responsibility and respect within the organization.
In practice
During a company meeting, a manager quotes this to emphasize the company's values.
We'll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We're going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that's the future of leadership.
Our success at Cisco has been defined by how we anticipate, capture, and lead through market transitions. Over the years, I've watched iconic companies disappear - Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Wang, Digital Equipment - as they failed to anticipate where the market was heading.
There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked.
It's connectivity that really makes the industrial Internet work: it's giving the right information at the right time to the right person or right machine to make the right decision.
Widening the talent pipeline sufficiently will require a generational commitment to teaching math and science, providing technical training, and mentoring young people of all backgrounds so they understand the full range of possibilities that a career in technology affords.
To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.
You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.
When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.
The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.
The measure of a leader is not the number of people who serve him, but the number of people he serves.
We treat employees as a member of the family. If management take the risk of hiring them, we have to take the responsibility for them.
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