Leadership Quotes - Page 128

Multi-tasking is keeping me from whole-hearted worship.

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

Our society and our organizations have learned to value masculine, 'quick-fix' traits in leaders. In a primitive society, a rural society, or even the industrial society of the early 1990s, quick fixes worked out all right. But they are less likely to work in a complex society. We need to look at long-range outcomes now. Service and patience are what can keep things running effectively today and women can contribute a lot in both of these areas.

There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don't have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them.

In the months ahead, I will leave the Department of Justice, but I will never -- I will never -- leave the work. I will continue to serve and try to find ways to make our nation even more true to its founding ideals.

The best way to learn is by doing; never ask others to do what you're not willing to do yourself.

I didn't set out to become a leader, so I always come back to my first lesson - just do it. If you're the first one out there actively doing something to solve a problem then you'll naturally fall into a leadership role.

Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.

In politics, as in business, leadership is crucial.

I don't care tuppence whether I'm forced into a leadership position or not. I'd much sooner not.

I think any genuine leader today has to learn leadership the hard way-by doing it. That means embracing turbulence and crisis, not avoiding it. It means "flying through the thunderstorm." That's not to say that there are no basic principles to orient you to the challenge. Indeed, I describe some in the book. But there are no simple recipes. Until you have lived it, you don't really know how to do it. That's what I mean by "leadership the hard way."

Mexican leadership has been doing serious damage to the United States by out-negotiating our representatives and political leaders.

On a dog sled team, unless you're the lead dog the view never changes.

A man's intelligence does not increase as he acquires power. What does increase is the difficulty of telling him so.

Wise leaders know that if an individual doesn't count, the institution doesn't count for much either. Put mathematically, if the individual is a zero, together a lot of zeros add up to a whole lot of nothing.

An effective leader is willing to think about what's happening and how to understand what's going on. Facilitating flow and making others more conscious of it, the leader communicates an awareness of process to the group, making them more aware of their energies and options. One important principle is to keep track of who has not spoken. ... It's also important to notice when people do speak out but are not heard. Effective leaders practice patience, reminding themselves to wait and observe, remembering that there's always more going on in a group than we're consciously aware of.

1 Timothy 3 lists only one gift, teaching, then follows w a list of character traits.

... what we should be looking for is fresh ideas of how we make moral decisions about our dealings with one another, economic, social, cultural. Economic determinism is an objectionable creed where men and women espouse it in its communist or capitalist form because it treats human beings as economic units and not as responsible persons.

We must remind our politicians that we expect them to speak honestly and to be concerned about real issues, and not simply with the obtaining or retaining of power.

The Western societies which espouse free market capitalism survive by the pursuit of greed and, in their own way, like Communism, throw into leadership men and women (mostly men) who know how to gain, exert and manipulate power.

The mayor of Sochi is now saying that there are no gay people in Sochi. So the only thing that is flaming over there now is the Olympic torch.

Here's a woman, a real pioneer for other women looking for careers in stand-up comedy. And talk about guts - she would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were unbelievable - where you would have to swallow pretty hard... but it was hilarious... the force of her comedy was overpowering.

What you see in the interview will not get significantly better when the individual is hired.

Never lower your standards just to fill a position. You will pay for it later.