… means to reach beyond the best you have ever given because doing so matters to you personally, for its own sake. It means to run your own race—as an individual, team, or organization. To excel is to know your greatest strengths and passions, and to emphasize them while honestly admitting and managing your weaknesses.
– Robert Cooper
… of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action — an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign — even as the rest of the world wonders why you’re not marching in step with the status quo. In other words, real leaders are happy to zig while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special.
– Bill Taylor
… creatures of their environment, but unlike most creatures, they are also movers of it. As movers of and within the organisation, they push it forward, at the same time shaping it as much as it shapes them.
– John Baldoni
… and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
– John F. Kennedy
… has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless… someone’s got to make a wake up call
– Warren Bennis
…. The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’
– Margaret Thatcher
… from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
– Mark Twain.
… always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
– Susan B. Anthony
… not only upon ability, not only upon capacity; having the capacity to lead is not enough. The leader must be willing to use it. Leadership is then based on truth and character. There must be truth in the purpose and willpower in the character.
– Vince Lombardi
… are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them
– Robert Jarvik
Leadership Licks 