Voices Carry
"True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the enrichment of the leaders.”
Robert Townsend
Up the Organization
“Ideas are worthless without a place to live. Just like a virus, an idea needs a host, a brain, to live in…. If your idea spreads from person to person, you’ll grow in influence and everything will get easier.”
–Seth Godin
All Marketers Are Liars
“The followers who are not responding tell us more about our management process than it tells us about them. If everybody but one person responds to the call, you may have spotted an individual with a behavior that needs correcting. If a number of people don’t respond, you are rarely looking at a performance problem—unless that performer is you! More than likely, a lack of timely response from a number of people is the result of some defect in your management system.”
–Aubrey C. Daniels and James E. Daniels
Measure of a Leader
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
–Leonard Cohen
Canadian singer, poet and novelist
“Champions of wildly successful initiatives relentlessly work out the right solutions. They mine their networks to find partners who can provide better answers. They learn by trying, and they recognize that they don’t have the right solutions unless it’s simple to understand and use. Finally, when they just can’t discern the right answer, they start by building a platform to stand on that gives them a better view.”
–Jane C. Linder
Spiral Up and Other Management Secrets
“The leaders who see and understand the financials and their impact simply do a better job of leading. They are also better communicators. Knowing what’s going on within the organization makes it far less likely that leaders will take a we/they approach in their conversations with employees.”
–Quint Studer
Results That Last
“Ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it, and all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance, not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently what you think you know is wrong.”
–Peter Drucker
in A Class with Drucker