On Leadership Quotes

“When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“A leader has to have the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain. He has to be able to raise tough questions without getting too anxious himself.”
― Harvard Business Review, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“By contrast, those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“When you look across the good-to-great transformations, they consistently display three forms of discipline: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“In fact, extensive informal networks are so important that if they do not exist, creating them has to be the focus of activity early in a major leadership initiative.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Strong networks of informal relationships—the kind found in companies with healthy cultures—help coordinate leadership activities in much the same way that formal structure coordinates managerial activities.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“In South Africa in the early 1990s, a joke was making the rounds: Given the country’s daunting challenges, people had two options, one practical and the other miraculous. The practical option was for everyone to pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and fix things. The miraculous option was for people to talk with one another until they could find a way forward.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Indeed, our recent research has led us to conclude that one of the most reliable indicators and predictors of true leadership is an individual’s ability to find meaning in negative events and to learn from even the most trying circumstances. Put another way, the skills required to conquer adversity and emerge stronger and more committed than ever are the same ones that make for extraordinary leaders.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Executives also owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs. It may not be the employees’ fault that they are underperforming, but even so, they have to be removed.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“They asked, “What needs to be done?” They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?” They developed action plans. They took responsibility for decisions. They took responsibility for communicating. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems. They ran productive meetings. They thought and said “we” rather than “I.”
― Harvard Business Review, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time. Hence, after asking what needs to be done, the effective executive sets priorities and sticks”
― Harvard Business Review, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner conversation, is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings.”
― Harvard Business Publishing, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
― Harvard Business Publishing, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Self-aware people know—and are comfortable talking about—their limitations and strengths, and they often demonstrate a thirst for constructive criticism. By contrast, people with low self-awareness interpret the message that they need to improve as a threat or a sign of failure.”
― Harvard Business Publishing, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“nothing important gets done alone.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality—while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neurotransmitters of the brain’s limbic system, which governs feelings, impulses, and drives. Research indicates that the limbic system learns best through motivation, extended practice, and feedback. Compare this with the kind of learning that goes on in the neocortex, which governs analytical and technical ability. The neocortex grasps concepts and logic.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Articulate each meeting’s purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan’s legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM’s industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“One can lead with no more than a question in hand.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“When told that future promotions will depend to some degree on their ability to nurture leaders, even people who say that leadership cannot be developed somehow find ways to do it.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Over the years, 3M has had a policy that at least 25% of its revenue should come from products introduced within the last five years. That encourages small new ventures, which in turn offer hundreds of opportunities to test and stretch young people with leadership potential.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“You get results by exploiting opportunities, not solving problems.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“Stockdale Paradox This finding is named after Admiral James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honor, who survived seven years in a Vietcong POW camp by hanging on to two contradictory beliefs: His life couldn’t be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Like Stockdale, people at the good-to-great companies in our research confronted the most brutal facts of their current reality, yet simultaneously maintained absolute faith that they would prevail in the end. And they held both disciplines—faith and facts—at the same time, all the time.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership