If you're interested in the job and in the kind of work that's done, you have to have an interest in who's going to fill your shoes.
Interpretation
True leadership involves caring about the future and who will carry on the work after you.
In this quote, John Paul Stevens emphasizes the importance of succession in leadership. A responsible leader shouldn't only focus on their current role but also consider who will take over and carry forward the mission. This approach fosters a culture of mentorship and ensures that the values and quality of work continue beyond one's tenure.
In practice
In a team meeting about succession planning, you could mention this quote to emphasize the importance of mentoring future leaders.
It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.
But I wound like people to think I was an honest judge and a good judge. And I always tried the reach the best result in every case.
It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.
I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.
While money is used to finance speech, money is not speech.
But I really think it's a very unfortunate part of our judicial system and I would feel much, much better if more states would really consider whether they think the benefits outweigh the very serious potential injustice, because in these cases the emotions are very, very high on both sides and to have stakes as high as you do in these cases, there is a special potential for error. We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.
The best buy by way of management is brains-at any price.
In the army, we do two things every day. We train our soldiers, and then we grow them into leaders, because frankly, we don't hire out. We grow our own leaders.
Lenity will operate with greater force, in some instances, than rigor. It is, therefore, my first wish, to have my whole conduct distinguished by it.
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for
He who takes the oath today to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States only assumes the solemn obligation which every patriotic citizen . . . should share with him. . . . Your every voter, as surely as your Chief Magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.