Quotes on Leadership

And if God has given you a lot of ability, I believe you should be held to a higher level of expectation.

Take the job or the project that scares you a little. It's the one with the most to teach you.

Show me a poorly uniformed troop and I'll show you a poorly uniformed leader.

It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something very different.

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.

The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.

Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.

It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of activity or methods. It must always relate directly to how life is better for everyone. . . . The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment.

It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.

It's awfully important to win with humility. It's also important to lose. I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose you won't know how to act. If you lose with humility, then you can come back.

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

On every team, there is a core group that sets the tone for everyone else. If the tone is positive, you have half the battle won. If it is negative, you are beaten before you ever walk on the field.

What's important is not the uniform or the number, and it's not what team you play for or whether anyone else sees your value; it's who you are on the inside. And when you're in Christ, that's never going to change.

Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.

Pain prompts us to change behavior that is destructive to ourselves or to others. Pain can be a highly effective instructor.

I hired top-notch people, trusted them to do their jobs, and then came to grips with the fact that I wouldn't be coaching as much.

Winning would create greater potential for change than talk alone.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Always drink upstream from the herd.