Judith M Bardwick Quotes

With air travel there is no distance, there is only time.

Motivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don't get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.

Nothing creates more self-respect among employees than being included in the process of making decisions.

Leaders must (1) define the business of the business, (2) create a winning strategy, (3) communicate persuasively, (4) behave with integrity, (5) respect others, and (6) act.

Credibility is lost when there are big discrepancies between what leaders say and what they do ... Increasing credibility requires openness. Hidden agendas will destroy trust.

The message to organizations is this: You have to increase the number of categories of contributing, or the types of career paths, which people can experience as successful. You cannot restrict esteem to the fewer and fewer who will be climbing up the management ladder. You need to have the majority of your people feeling like winners.

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

The need for challenge, the need to burst through the constrictions of tasks and situations already seen and mastered, can affect anyone, even those enjoying the greatest gains from success.

In organizations where nothing much happens regardless of whether you do something exceptional or just show up in the morning, the best people lose heart and motivation is reduced near the lowest common denominator.

Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.

Real confidence comes from knowing and accepting yourself- your strengths and your limitations -in contrast to depending on affirmation from others.

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news ... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

Very few people are ambitious in the sense of having a specific image of what they want to achieve. Most people's sights are only toward the next run, the next increment of money.

There's a large core of powerlessness which is balanced against the unwritten contract that says that if you behave, you'll be okay. No wonder people pay so much attention to knowing the rules, to knowing the right people, to not making waves, to never making errors
to not risking, trying, innovating.

We know that productivity suffers when uncertainty is high. But we've failed to realize the equally destructive effects of too little anxiety ... By protecting people from risk, we destroy their self-esteem. We rob them of the opportunity to become strong, competent people.

If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy.

I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work.