Inc Leadership Quotes

good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

Entrepreneur, take a bite out of Apple's innovation so in turn you can bear fruits of creativity.

My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

Peter Schmeichel, Paul Ince, Bryan Robson, Roy Keane, Mark Hughes and Eric Cantona could all start a fight in an empty house.

a mentoring program that pairs new managers with experienced ones. A key facet of this program is that mentors and mentees work together for an extended period of time—eight months. They meet about all aspects of leadership, from career development and confidence building to managing personnel challenges and building healthy team environments.

The Saudis considered the petroleum under their soil a gift from God, but accessing its value laid within man’s capacity. Until the Saudis developed the capabilities themselves, they would simply import the human capital they needed to make that petroleum valuable. This meant importing Aramco to run the oil industry, IBI and, later, other companies to build modern cities and transportation, and even American financial advisors to create a modern banking system. The trick was to buy what they did not have from the outside, and then to make it their own.

You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!

leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged. But that is just one example of how hidden-ness affects a manager’s ability to lead.

Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” -Franklin D.  Roosevelt

This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around—and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion—then the crew will balk. They know better than anyone when they are working hard but not going anywhere. People want their leaders to be confident. Andrew doesn’t advise being confident merely for confident’s sake. He believes that leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

The phenomenon I’m describing, rooted so firmly in that primal human drive for self-preservation, probably doesn’t sound surprising: We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses and save their lesser moments for their peers, spouses, or therapists. And yet, so many managers aren’t aware of it when it’s happening (perhaps because they enjoy being deferred to). It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged. But that is just one example of how hidden-ness affects a manager’s ability to lead.

That couldn’t have happened if the producer of the movie—and the company’s leadership in general—hadn’t been open to a new viewpoint that challenged the status quo. That kind of openness is only possible in a culture that acknowledges its own blind spots. It’s only possible when managers understand that others see problems they don’t—and that they also see solutions.

One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

So my time really isn’t done. I’ll lay down my sword and now I’ve picked up my pen because I was there with the Clintons. I could not keep silent then, and I can’t keep silent now. You and I have to do our jobs and take the heat when we mess up. If I so much as accidentally use my government credit card on a personal purchase, I immediately take the hit. Why do we expect any less from our leadership? From Clinton Inc.?

Religion allies itself with auto-suggestion and psychotherapy to help man in his business activities. In the twenties one had not yet called upon God for purposes of “improving one's personality.” The best-seller in the year 1938, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, remained on a strictly secular level. What was the function of Carnegie's book at that time is the function of our greatest bestseller today, The Power of Positive Thinking by the Reverend N. V. Peale. In this religious book it is not even questioned whether our dominant concern with success is in itself in accordance with the spirit of monotheistic religion. On the contrary, this supreme aim is never doubted, but belief in God and prayer is recommended as a means to increase one's ability to be successful. Just as modern psychiatrists recommend happiness of the employee, in order to be more appealing to the customers, some ministers recommend love of God in order to be more successful. “Make God your partner”, means to make God a partner in business, rather than to become one with Him in love, justice and truth. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that he is there, he runs the show (although it would probably run without him too), you never see him, but you acknowledge his leadership while you are “doing your part.

Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the control, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of creating culture easier, but ease isn’t the goal. Excellence is.

Disney animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could FEEL that fear and in notes meetings everyone was so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that they held back. We had to learn we weren’t attacking the person. We were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that has not working and leaves the strongest framework. Earning trust takes time. There is no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged.

They were not in a position to challenge the preconception that their group was based on. In addition, the solution could never have been suggested by the leadership we replaced, either, because they believed that the oversight group was performing an important function by creating more transparency and imposing discipline on the process. But here was the irony: Creating this layer to enforce the limits actually made the limits less clear, diminishing their effectiveness.

Leaders rooted in the logic of multiplication believe: 1. Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2. All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3. Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment. For example, when Apple Inc. needed to achieve rapid growth with flat resources in one division, they didn’t expand their sales force.

André V. Chapman holds his Master’s in Organizational Management as well as a Certificate of Completion from the Harvard Business School program, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management. He is the Founder & CEO of Unity Care Group, Inc., and he started the Covid19-Black initiative as an educational movement to reduce the effect of the coronavirus on the African American community. Mr. Chapman is a Fell of the American Leadership Forum.

And yet, so many managers aren’t aware of it when it’s happening (perhaps because they enjoy being deferred to). It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged. But that is just one example of how hidden-ness affects a manager’s ability to lead.

Спосіб створити щось велике — це створити щось просте». Мається на увазі нашу людську умову ускладнення всього, до чого ми торкаємося, і дивовижний приріст продуктивності завдяки спрощенню. Браян О'Коннел із Service-Leadership Inc. має вислів, який змушує мене щоразу сміятися. Він каже: «немає нічого простого, що ми не могли б ускладнити!»

What makes me the proudest about Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., is that she truly lives up to the ideals and principles she stands for. This sisterhood is proactive and is ever progressing, never settling, and always upholding the highest level of expectations of the membership and all that she comes in contact with. At the forefront of any major change you will always see a Delta; the leadership of any progressing organization always had a Delta in the midst. My sisters are dynamic in all their ways and that makes me proud to be a Delta. They are examples of the essence of Fortitude in every sense of the word! —LaKesha Russ, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

$20M in sales, our leadership team was dysfunctional and divided. Prior to this, our culture had earned several “Best Places to Work” accolades, and our performance was repeatedly acknowledged by Inc. Magazine’s, Inc. 5000 award, and Ernst & Young honored our success as a finalist for their Entrepreneur of the year award.

It isn't enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.

After The Lion King was released in 1994, eventually grossing $952 million worldwide, the studio began its slow decline. It was hard, at first, to deduce why—there had been some leadership changes, yet the bulk of the people were still there, and they still had the talent and the desire to do great work. Nevertheless, the drought that was beginning then would last for the next sixteen years: From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its employees thinking that their job was to feed the Beast.

Leadership is about being visionary, creative and initiative. It's the urge to make things better wherever and whenever possible.

Organizational culture has been defined as a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in organizations