Profiles in Leadership Quotes

“the command’s “true basis lies in the earnest cooperation of the senior officers assigned to an allied theater. Since cooperation, in turn, implies such things as selflessness, devotion to a common cause, generosity in attitude, and mutual confidence, it is easy to see that actual unity in an allied command depends directly upon the individuals in the field…. Patience, tolerance, frankness, absolute honesty in all dealings, particularly with all persons of the opposite nationality, and firmness, are absolutely essential…. [T] he thing you must strive for is the utmost in mutual respect and confidence among the group of seniors making up the allied command [Eisenhower’s italics].” Eisenhower practiced what he preached. No matter how wearing his duties or how grim the military outlook, by act of will Eisenhower as supreme commander “firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory.” His British colleague and sometime rival Bernard Montgomery conceded that Eisenhower’s “real strength lies in his human qualities…. He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bits of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once. He is the very incarnation of sincerity.” Omar Bradley noted more succinctly that Eisenhower’s smile was worth twenty divisions.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Leaders aren’t just the few famous people who dominate the news or find their place in history books. They don’t always represent the majority. They aren’t always popular. They don’t always win, and they aren’t always remembered. Leaders such as Pauli Murray, brave and obscure men and women who act on their convictions even though they fail time and time again, sometimes change the course of history.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Never an insider, Murray used her outsider status to make herself a thorn in the side of segregation and political oppression.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Despite the fact that Murray was one of the preeminent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, most people have never heard of her. She achieved her leadership role and her success in subverting white supremacy by learning from her failures and capitalizing on the most incremental successes.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Pauli Murray perfected two characteristics of leadership: indomitable persistence and relentless self-invention.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Willkie’s dedication to private ownership merited praise for its uniqueness, said the magazine. “He knows all the arguments. They are persuasive… not because they are new, but because he frames them intelligently, and hence he makes them sound new.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Paradoxically, the man who had distinguished himself in history’s greatest military conflict harbored a deep characterological aversion to conflict among his military colleagues as well as in the civil society over which he eventually presided. Ironically, the very skills of process leadership that gained Eisenhower such immense popularity and thus uniquely positioned him to transform his countrymen’s values on the race question evidenced a personality incapable of embracing the necessarily divisive role that civil rights leadership required.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“A striking result of this experiment was the consistency with which the subjects differentiated the roles of task specialist and socioemotional specialist (or process specialist). The task specialist typically took the initiative in conversation, defined the nature of the objective, and kept the discussion focused on the requirements of the task. His success might be measured by the extent to which he devised a viable plan of action and elicited sufficient agreement (not necessarily unanimity) within the group to realize that plan. The socioemotional specialist typically listened and responded more to others, endorsed their suggestions, encouraged their participation, and sometimes relieved tension with jokes. He was usually better liked than the task specialist. His success might be gauged as a function of the group’s ability to maintain a sense of corporate identity and purpose. Virtually all groups expressed these distinct functions, and significantly, they were nearly always performed by different individuals.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“This distinction has been described as differentiating task-oriented and process-oriented leadership attributes. The identification of these discrete components of leadership has been empirically documented in laboratory studies of group behavior by psychologists Robert F. Bales and Philip E. Slater.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“the skills possessed by a designated leader or the holder of an office may make him well-qualified to perform important group functions under certain conditions and poorly qualified under others…. The specific requirements of the group’s tasks demand that members possess certain skills in order to serve the appropriate functions. If the task changes, different behaviors are required, and the same person may or may not be able to perform in the new way.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“HOW TO EXPLAIN the striking contrast between Eisenhower’s sweepingly successful leadership of the Allied cause in Europe during World War II and his disappointing failure to provide leadership to the cause of civil rights as president?”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Eisenhower, in short, had perfected the art of playing against his assigned role, first as a nonmilitary general and later as a nonpolitical president. This deliberately cultivated style had proved enormously successful in war. How would it work in the White House?”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“By war’s end Eisenhower had not only masterfully completed the acquisition and deployment of his chosen leadership techniques but succeeded in projecting their appeal to wide segments of the American public. Both political parties sought him as a presidential candidate.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Eisenhower defined the ability to nurture optimism and elicit cooperation as the essence of leadership. He believed that such ability was not an innate but an acquired characteristic, the acquisition of which resulted from serious psychological study. “The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men,” he wrote to his son in 1943.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Eisenhower instinctively felt that the gossamer tissue of personal relationships counted for far more than the formal architecture of his table of organization in determining the success or failure of his command. “The problem of establishing unity in any allied command,” he explained to Lord Louis Mountbatten, “involves the human equation.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“FEW LEADERS ARE MEN FOR ALL SEASONS. THE QUALITIES THAT DEFINE an effective leader in one circumstance may be useless or even mischievous in another.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“For Grant, who hailed the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment as the completion of “the greatest civil change… since the nation came into life,” nothing less than the war’s outcome hung in the balance, as the terrorists and their wellborn political leaders attempted to reverse the outcome at Appomattox.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“Unlike many of his contemporaries, Finney did not believe in American exceptionalism—or blind patriotism. “There can scarcely be conceived a more abominable and fiendish maxim,” he wrote, “than ‘our country right or wrong,’” a maxim that, he noted, had been adopted in the case of the 1846 war with Mexico. On a national day of fasting in 1841, he called for a “public confession of national sins,” identifying those he found particularly egregious. One of them was “the outrageous injustice with which this nation has treated the aborigines in this country.” (He was referring in particular to the expulsion of the Cherokees from Georgia in 1838–39.) Another was of course slavery. By 1846 he had confronted the argument that slavery was a lesser evil than the division of the Union. “A nation,” he exclaimed, “who have drawn the sword and bathed in blood in defense of the principle that all men have an inalienable right to liberty, that they are born free and equal. Such a nation… standing with its proud foot on the neck of three millions of crushed and prostrate slaves! Oh horrible! This is less an evil to the world than emancipation, or even than the dismemberment of our hypocritical union! Oh, shame, where is thy blush?” Finney, needless to say, supported war with the South when it came.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness

“HOW GOOD A GENERAL WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON? IF WE CONSULT the statistics as they might have been kept if he had been a boxer or a quarterback, the figures are not encouraging. In seven years of fighting the British, from 1775 to 1782, he won only three clear-cut victories—at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown. In seven other encounters—Long Island, Harlem Heights, White Plains, Fort Washington, Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth—he either was defeated or at best could claim a draw. He never won a major battle. Trenton was essentially a raid, Princeton was little more than a large skirmish, and Yorktown was a siege in which the blockading French fleet was an essential component of the victory.”
― Walter Isaacson, Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness