Dna Leadership Quotes

recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one “leadership competency” of the future.

The first thing that has to be recognized is that one cannot train someone to be passionate--it's either in their DNA or it's not.

We all have the DNA of an entrepreneur. Some are building their own dreams. While most are building other people's dreams. Entrepreneurs are Dream Builders. Are you building yours?

If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

First, a unique vision must “ooze” from the leader’s life as well as the church’s leadership community. Second, this vision must create a stunningly unique culture inside the church that is inclined and motivated to penetrate the culture outside the church. In other words, reaching the surrounding community should be innate, driven by the church’s DNA rather than programming.

FIGURE 5.20 The Sales Force’s DNA However, it wasn’t yet a full set of operating instructions. To make the code practically useful, we would need to understand how the framework should be applied to the task of managing any particular sales force. We had the “superset” of things leadership could measure and manage, but we needed clear guidelines to help cull from it the handful of activities and metrics that would enable leadership to focus on its own organizational goals. We needed to know how to apply these insights in a targeted and tactical way. Fortunately, we were on the verge of doing just that.

Stand firm in the faith The next charge is to stand firm. A common theme of leadership is the need to be steadfast and stable. Be resolute, especially in your convictions. Plant your feet shoulder length apart so that you can’t be easily blown off course. But stand firm in the faith. Stand on what is solid (Matthew 7:24- 27). Take a stand on the rock of absolute truth in a sandy world without absolutes. To stand firm in the faith you have to know the faith. You have to be grounded in the scriptures. You have to be truth-driven, scripture- soaked and washed. You have to know and articulate the Gospel. You’re only able to stand firm and put off the fear of man when you are informed by the fear of God. You need a dogged tenacity, a voraciousness for the truth of the word of God marked by a red-hot devotional life. Ransack your Bible, tear through it with urgency and let it work your soul out and work into the DNA of who you are. You need that spiritual stability. Remember how Jesus responded when he was tempted by Satan — He went to scripture. Again and again He said, “It is written...” To stand firm in the faith, you have be able to call on scripture when you’re under attack. Think of it in the context of hand to hand combat in the military. When you’re standing firm, you’re able to take a punch. You’ve got your dukes up. You’re alert and watching. You’re dodging and weaving. You’re steady and able to fight. That’s the picture Paul’s giving. In his letter to the Ephesians, he adds the context of doing this in the “whole armor of God”: “Therefore take up the whole armor of God,” he writes, “that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Eph. 6:13).

No matter how much power and authority you perceive resides in your title or position, no matter how eloquently you articulate the call of God and the needs of the world, no matter how well you strategize, plan and pray, the actual behaviors of the congregation—the default functioning, the organizational DNA—dominate in times of stress and change.

Contrary to what most of the public had heard or thought they had seen, there was reliable evidence that Michael Brown was not surrendering when he was shot, and there was DNA evidence that he had assaulted the officer and tried to take his gun. In one sense, those conclusions by federal investigators—reached months after Michael Brown’s death—didn’t matter; most of the world had already heard false reports and believed Brown was gunned down while surrendering with his hands up. In the time it took for the truth to get its boots on, false information had circled the earth many times.

Quality management,” like “change management,” needs to be embedded into the corporate culture, and becomes part of corporate DNA.

God is shaking his daughters awake and summoning us to engage. His vision for us is affirming and raises the bar for all of us. We cannot settle for less. We have work to do. There's a kingdom to build, and what we do truly matters. Our compass is fixed on Jesus. We can no longer listen to those who call us to love him with less than all our heart and soul and strength and mind. We may not have titles, position, or power in the eyes of others, but leadership is in our DNA. The call to rule and subdue places kingdom responsibility on our shoulders.

Long gone are the days when a leader knew which buttons to press in their hierarchical organization so that decisions and resulting instructions are carried out smartly. The command-and-control structures have morphed into highly complex networks.” Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, leadership specialists

People deeply crave a new way.

Dive Deeper: Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless have come up with a menu of 33 well defined yet simple structures that are designed to allow the inclusion of everyone across all levels of the organization and stakeholder community. They refer to these simple structures as Liberating Structures in their book of the same title.

The reality of execution is that nothing changes until people’s behaviors change.

Rather than blaming people for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on altering the environment to help them succeed.

Consistent behavior can be like a turbo boost for your organization, and it won’t cost you anything extra. In contrast, inconsistent behavior can be a major stumbling block if you underestimate its importance in achieving effective execution.

Vital Behaviors reflect an organization’s brand, policies, procedures, work processes, terms, and tools.

The behaviors must connect at an emotional level for people. They must be personally rewarding, not just for the organization.

Our ultimate promise brings surprisingly good news: achieving organizational behavior change is easier than achieving individual behavior change.

Vital Behaviors can be relatively straightforward (like safety procedures) or extremely complex (like decision-making). They can be identified at any level of an organization.

Sometimes the cause of behavioral hotspots lies hidden elsewhere in the process.

Simply relying on leaders isn’t enough to make habits stick in a company.

Make sure you consider how performance improvement in one area might have a positive or negative ripple effect on the rest of the organization.

The important thing to remember is that Vital Behaviors are dynamic, not static. They will change as people ask for more clarity and as conditions change.

Lasting habits can only be created when a person’s internal and external environments are aligned.

There are 3 Pillars that every employee needs to succeed: (1) clear expectations, (2) actionable feedback, and (3) barrier removal.

The behaviors must connect at an emotional level for people. They must be personally rewarding, not just for the organization.

External environment is more important than internal, personal motivation— because if you change your environment, behavior change will follow, and so will a change in your thoughts and beliefs.

Instead of blaming individuals for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on understanding observable behaviors and how the environment can be adjusted to support desired changes.

External environment is more important than internal, personal motivation— because if you change your environment, behavior change will follow, and so will a change in your thoughts and beliefs.

People need to know that leaders are doing everything possible to remove barriers that hamper their doing the “right” things.

Embedding Vital Behaviors into an organization’s DNA is both a science and an art.

There is no greater truth than this: God created you for success. He gave you all the physical. mental, and spiritual DNA to succeed. He loves you through your mistakes and loves you enough to correct you when you step out of line. If you have not done it lately, Grab on to His great big hands of love and let Him take you places you have never dreamed of going. He’s that AWESOME!

There is no greater truth than this: God created you for success. He gave you all the physical, mental, and spiritual DNA to succeed. He loves you through your mistakes and loves you enough to correct you when you step out of line. If you have not done it lately, Grab on to His great big hands of love and let Him take you places you have never dreamed of going. He’s that AWESOME!

The wonderful world of human relationships is a rich mixture of backgrounds, perceptions, habits, preferences, behaviors, and motivators. These differences can create barriers to communication and connection, creating a lack of understanding or clarity. Just as we each have our own genetic DNA that makes us unique, we also have personality traits that do the same.

If the church already has Type 3, 4, and 5 leaders trained in theological education institutions, it will be very difficult to change the DNA of the church and leadership development to a different pattern. But we can still look for ways to develop the majority of leaders. Perhaps we can infuse new DNA from the edges. If we focus our leadership-development efforts only or mainly on preparing people to be full-time pastors of established churches (Type 3 leaders), we risk causing church stagnation and decline. Making new disciples is not these leaders’ main practical priority.

Social ecologist Gregory Bateson foresaw how the separating of mind from matter – spirit from nature – creates all sorts of problems. For Bateson, this separation is an error of the most fundamental degree. This error, Bateson saw woven into Western habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels, undermining our capacity to flourish sustainably on Earth. He felt that it is what pits humanity against nature and provides for our prevalent worldview of survival through competition, in what he viewed as “an ecology of bad ideas” breeding parasitic humans, purely self-centered and destructive of their host environment. He noted that if you, “see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration, the environment will be yours to exploit…If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over-grazing” (Bateson, 2000).

Future success will be determined by organizations’ ability to be more innovative, agile, purposeful and resilient.

If you want to build a ship, don’t gather people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.” Antoine De Saint Expurery, writer

Business is such a powerful creative force on this planet; a force that is able to contribute either constructively or destructively to the future vitality of life on Earth.

Today, the amount of fossil fuels humanity uses in one year took one million years to build up underground (Wahl, 2016).

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most able to adapt to change.” Charles Darwin, biologist

Manage Your Career Take responsibility for your own career, and manage it. People will tell you to “follow your passion.” This, again, is bullshit. I would like to be quarterback for the New York Jets. I’m tall, have a good arm, decent leadership skills, and would enjoy owning car dealerships after my knees go. However, I have marginal athletic ability—learned this fast at UCLA. People who tell you to follow your passion are already rich. Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don’t have to love it, just don’t hate it. If practice takes you from good to great, the recognition and compensation you will command will make you start to love it. And, ultimately, you will be able to shape your career and your specialty to focus on the aspects you enjoy the most. And if not—make good money and then go follow your passion. No kid dreams of being a tax accountant. However, the best tax accountants on the planet fly first class and marry people better looking than themselves—both things they are likely to be passionate about.

Without cultural change, we are hopeless to change existing results.5 Of all changes, cultural change is the most difficult. It is essentially changing the collective DNA of an entire group of people. To understand how to change culture, it is helpful to know how change works in general. Changing Church Culture Change is extremely difficult. One of the most vivid and striking examples of this painful reality is the inability of heart patients to change even when confronted with grim reality. Roughly six hundred thousand people have a heart bypass each year in the United States. These patients are told they must change. They must change their eating habits, must exercise, and quit smoking and drinking. If they do not, they will die. The case for change is so compelling that they are literally told, “Change or die.”6 Yet despite the clear instructions and painful reality, 90 percent of the patients do not change. Within two years of hearing such brutal facts, they remain the same. Change is that challenging for people. For the vast majority of patients, death is chosen over change. Yet leadership is often about change, about moving a group of people to a new future. Perhaps the most recognized leadership book on leading an organization to change is John Kotter’s Leading Change. And when ministry leaders speak or write about leadership, they often look to the wisdom found in the book of Nehemiah, as it chronicles Nehemiah’s leadership in rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah led wide-scale change. Nehemiah never read Kotter’s book, and he led well without it. The Lord well equipped Nehemiah for the task of leading God’s people. But it is fascinating to see how Nehemiah’s actions mirror much of what Kotter has observed in leaders who successfully lead change. With a leadership development culture in mind, here are the eight steps for leading change, according to Kotter, and how one can see them in Nehemiah’s leadership. 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Leaders must create dissatisfaction with an ineffective status quo. They must help others develop a sense of angst over the brokenness around them. Nehemiah heard a negative report from Jerusalem, and it crushed him to the point of weeping, fasting, and prayer (Neh. 1:3–4). Sadly, the horrible situation in Jerusalem had become the status quo. The disgrace did not bother the people in the same way that it frustrated Nehemiah. After he arrived in Jerusalem, he walked around and observed the destruction. Before he launched the vision of rebuilding the wall, Nehemiah pointed out to the people that they were in trouble and ruins. He started with urgency, not vision. Without urgency, plans for change do not work. If you assess your culture and find deviant behaviors that reveal some inaccurate theological beliefs, you must create urgency by pointing these out. If you assess your culture and find a lack of leadership development, a sense of urgency must be created. Leadership development is an urgent matter because the mission the Lord has given us is so great.

John Maxwell suggests that leadership can be defined in one word—influence.

Learning to see and manage work from a value stream perspective is a powerful way to instill new ways of thinking into the DNA of your organization and achieve higher levels of performance.

Transformation requires fundamental changes in an organization's DNA; done well, value stream mapping can be instrumental in facilitating the necessary shifts in mindsets and behaviors.

It's the process of value stream mapping rather than the maps themselves that carries the greatest power by installing transformational mindsets and behaviors into the DNA of an organization.

Most real change is not about change. It’s about identifying what cultural DNA is worth conserving, is precious and essential, and that indeed makes it worth suffering the losses so that you can find a way to bring the best of your tradition and history and values into the future.7