Warren G. Bennis Quotes

The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.

Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.

Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

I'd always rather err on the side of openness. But there's a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call. The art of leadership is knowing how much information you're going to pass on - to keep people motivated and to be as honest, as upfront, as you can. But, boy, there really are limits to that.

People who know what they want and why they want it, and have the skills to communicate that to others in a way that gains support

Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.

Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions.

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change.

While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.

What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.

If you're the leader, you've got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies - that you know and must do everything. Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others.

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.

Leadership (according to John Sculley) revolves around vision, ideas, direction, and has more to do with inspiring people as to direction and goals than with day-to-day implementation. A leader must be able to leverage more than his own capabilities. He must be capable of inspiring other people to do things without actually sitting on top of them with a checklist.

The leader ... is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas.

You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself.

The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes. The worst problem in leadership is basically early success.

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.

Once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals ...

The ideal boss for a growing leader is probably a good boss with major flaws, so that one can learn all the complex lessons of what to do and what not to do simultaneously.

Recognize the skills and traits you don't possess, and hire the people who have them.

The new leader is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change.

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.

A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless ... someone's got to make a wake up call.

Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.

Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.

The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person.

Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future ... I am certain that leadership can be learned and that terrific coaches ... facilitate learning.

Successful leaders are great askers

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept.

Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – and the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.

Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.

Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.

In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.

The manager administers; the leader innovates.

We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.

Trust resides squarely between faith and doubt.

Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.

This is more than just having a vision. You can see the difference in the often-cited way in which Steve Jobs brought in John Sculley to take over Apple. At the time, Sculley was destined to be the head of Pepsico. The clincher came when Jobs asked him, "How many more years of your life do you want to spend making colored water when you can have an opportunity to come here and change the world?"

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause.

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.

The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom-as something they thought was almost a necessity. It's as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.

A passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purposes of work and human organisations

Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders
are made rather than born.

Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work ... I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn't make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.