Sunday, March 6, 2016 – Follow the Leader
I’m a leader. I’ve never had any problems leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. ~ Donald Trump
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it. ~ Andrew Carnegie
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. ~ Eric Hoffer
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership. ~ Colin Powell
Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones. ~ Tahir Shah
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish, and nothing more. ~ Orson Scott Card
The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows. ~ Thornton Wilder
Rulers are not anointed. They are created by the void of self-mastery. ~ T. F. Hodge
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. ~ Lao Tzu
I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men. ~ Lao Tzu
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. ~ J. P. Morgan
A leader is a dealer in hope. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas? ~ Margaret Thatcher
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. ~ Thomas Sowell
The real leader has no need to lead – he is content to point the way. ~ Henry Miller
People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision. ~ John C. Maxwell
The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided. ~ Casey Stengel
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both. ~ Vaclav Havel
I’m not a natural leader. I’m too intellectual; I’m too abstract; I think too much. ~ Newt Gingrich
The great leaders have always stage-managed their effects. ~ Charles de Gaulle
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. ~ John Updike
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it – short-term pain for long-term gain. ~ George Will
Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it. ~ John Naisbitt
I must follow the people. Am I not their leader? ~ Benjamin Disraeli
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it. ~ Mao Zedong
When a man assumes leadership, he forfeits the right to mercy. ~ Gennaro Angiulo
I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office. ~ George W. Bush
It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson
Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men – the other 999 follow women. ~ Groucho Marx
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep. ~ Talleyrand
I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it. ~ Eugene Victor Debs
In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it. ~ Seth Godin
Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal. ~ Howard Gardner
He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the somber sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Take a guy who can walk on water, who can raise people from the dead, who can look at you and tell you what you had for breakfast… if a guy like that can’t find twelve trustworthy mates, who can? Stop at eleven and call it done, that’s the moral of that story. ~ Liam Perrin
Just Above Sunset 