Icon Leadership Quotes

If you must walk in someone's shadow make sure it's your own

Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere alikuwa baba kwa familia yake. Kwa Tanzania alikuwa mlezi; wa ndoto ya haki, amani, uzalendo, ujamaa, na uhuru.

If there are no obstacles or enemies in your path, you're going the wrong way.

The cure for self-centeredness is found in our vision, in how we see people. I suppose we could say that self-centered people have 'I' trouble and need their vision corrected.

Mandela alikuwa hodari ndiyo maana akapelekwa jela. Alikuwa mvumilivu ndiyo maana akakaa jela kwa miaka ishirini na saba. Alivyotoka akawa kiongozi bora wa Afrika Kusini. Utu ukafanya awasamehe binadamu wenzake. Urithi wa Nelson Mandela kwetu ni uhodari, uvumilivu, uongozi bora, utu na msamaha kwa binadamu wenzetu. Mandela alikuwa baba kwa familia yake. Kwa Afrika Kusini alikuwa mlezi wa ndoto, ya amani na uhuru.

Growth is the essence of life. Therefore, we could say that stagnation (complacency), being the opposite, is the harbinger of death.

Leaders take massive action and, therefore, submit themselves to massive criticism. In order to lead like a superhero, you will need to develop very thick skin.

Leaders need to be simmered for a long time before they become tender-hearted, wise, and self-sacrificing, So be patient and consistent.

Life chooses your acquaintances, but you must choose your friends. My advice: choose wisely!

Model yourself after great men and women, but never imitate. Aspire to be and do like them, but never desire to be them. Be a student, not a follower. Achieve your own greatness through your own uniqueness. Be a leader.

What you think about yourself will ultimately determine how, and if, you lead. What you think about others will determine how you will treat them and lead them. How you see the world will determine what you desire to bring to it.

A single employee, with one message, can succinctly capture the essence of a corporation the same way an iconic photograph captures a moment. Unfortunately, it is usually the negative massages that are published or used in lawsuits.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

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.

in successful leadership, it isn’t just education and intellect that matter. It’s the power of will, focus, self-sacrifice, and dedication to a higher goal that can not only make scared teenagers perform brilliantly in combat but also drive often-confused corporate employees, frequently confronted with an overwhelming array of conflicting objectives, toward success.

The measure of our leadership is greatly determined by what measures we take in confronting our difficult circumstances.

Leadership is not something that should be pursued just to further one's career; it should be pursued because it makes one a better human being. The values and qualities it requires make it so.

The worth and value of your ambition hinges on the principles which nourish it.

Ultimately, the people we spend the most time with will greatly influence the person we become, the leader we become.

The higher the goal, the higher the possibility of significant achievement. We rarely hit a perfect mark on our goals, which is why it is important to aim high.

Your purpose is determined in large part by your unique superpowers: your gifts, talents, and abilities. Find them, and run with them. It will bless you and make you a blessing to others.

Leadership is all about making the jump, taking risks, and learning from your mistakes. It's about falling, dusting ourselves off, and getting back up again and again and again.

Commitment and responsibility are key elements of leadership. Anybody who wants to lead is, in fact, saying, 'I want to take on more responsibility.

Wisdom is the applied synthesis of knowledge + experience + timing. It is the application of your knowledge and experience in the most potent way possible and in the timeliest of manners.

The greatest leaders are those who follow their bliss, fulfill their personal legend, and help others do the same on a daily basis.

Leading oneself is not only a daily challenge, but one that will last for a lifetime. While you will never master yourself completely, it should nevertheless be your aim.

Become a student of success, rather than a student of how to make money. Success, true success, spreads over the whole spectrum of life -- not just our finances.

Leading like a superhero means going that extra, grueling mile for the sake of others. It's being able to demonstrate superhuman endurance, empathy, and selflessness.

Leadership, unlike heroism, is a team sport --always. It is based on consistency and progress.

Before we too can move mountains, we must learn to walk the daily grind, one quiet step at a time. We must learn to serve before we can lead.

I believe comic books and superheroes affect our culture so much because they serve to remind us of this powerful and deeply ingrained fact: we matter.

What fires have you kindled in the hearts of others because of the inferno in yours?

Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles. He was a farmer. Powerful guy. He went and took on the challenge, took over Rome, took over the army, and won the war. After they won the war, he felt he’d done his mission and was asked to go and be the emperor, and he gave the ring back and went back to farming. He didn’t only do this once. He did it twice. When they tried to overthrow the empire from within, they asked him back and he came back. He cleaned up the mess through great, great leadership. He had tremendous leadership quality in bringing people together. And again, he gave the ring back and went back to farming.

Leadership isn’t just for global icons and marketplace titans. It’s an arena everyone gets to play in. Because leadership is a lot less about having a formal title, a large office and money in the bank. And a lot more about committing to mastery over all you do—and in who you are. It’s about resisting the tyranny of the ordinary, refusing to allow negativity to hijack your sense of awe and preventing any form of slavery to mediocrity from infesting your life. Leadership is about making a difference, right where you’re planted. Real leadership is about sending out brave work that exemplifies genius, turns your whole field on its head by its scope, innovation and execution, and is so staggeringly sublime that it stands the test of time.

But notice that Paul’s teaching on the veil in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 insists that a woman who prays and prophesies in the church should be allowed to wear a symbol that was a cultural icon for honor, chastity, and protection. As far as it was in his power, Paul at least symbolically protected women slaves who were believers from being sexually used by those in the Christian community who submitted to his guidance and leadership.

To be clear, every day—for the rest of your life—you’ll be faced with the chance of showing leadership, wherever you are and in all that you do. Leadership isn’t just for global icons and marketplace titans. It’s an arena everyone gets to play in. Because leadership is a lot less about having a formal title, a large office and money in the bank. And a lot more about committing to mastery over all you do—and in who you are. It’s about resisting the tyranny of the ordinary, refusing to allow negativity to hijack your sense of awe and preventing any form of slavery to mediocrity from infesting your life. Leadership is about making a difference, right where you’re planted.

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

Why does the United States, the strongest nation in the world with the latest technology, weapons and equipment and the best fighting forces in the world, run away when the going gets tough?  Just imagine the aftermath of leaving Afghanistan when the Taliban return with a vengeance. The answer lies with the leadership of this country and the infiltration of socialist and communist values into our society. The constant brainwashing of the American people by the left wing news media including such icons as Walter Cronkite and the influence of liberal colleges on our youth become insurmountable and we find ourselves where we are today, 2013.