Quotes on Great Leadership

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure - which is: Try to please everybody.

Any great and inspiring leader or organization that ever existed set out to do something completely unrealistic.

To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way.

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.

Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position.

To lead people, walk beside them ... As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves!

It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.

What you do has far greater impact than what you say.

High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.