Lean Leadership Quotes

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." (Harvard Business School definition of leadership)

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on.

Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.

The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't.

Give us a world where half our homes are run by men, and half our institutions are run by women. I'm pretty sure that would be a better world.

Presenting leadership as a list of carefully defined qualities (like strategic, analytical, and performance-oriented) no longer holds. Instead, true leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed.... Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as Deborah, instead of silenced as Jezebel.

Control your own Destiny or somebody else will

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

With a deep sigh, Lucius resumed pacing. "Honestly, I can't stand this going around anymore. The story is quite simple. You, Antanasia, are the last of a long line of powerful vampires. The Dragomirs. Vampire royalty." Now that made me laugh, a squeaky, kind of hysterical laugh. "Vampire royalty. Right." Yes. Royalty. And that is the last part of the story, which your parents still seem reluctant to relate." Lucius leaned over the table across from me, bracing his arms, staring me down. "You are a vampire princess—the heir to the Dragomir leadership. I am a vampire prince. The heir to an equally powerful clan, the Vladescus. More powerful, I would say, but that's not the point. We were pledged to each other in an engagement ceremony shortly after our births.

Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she’s accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.

Courage is leaning into the doubts and fears to do what you know is right even when it doesn’t feel natural or safe.

Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.

We have to change the culture from one in which people simply do their own job in their own function to make their own numbers look good (a vertical focus) to one in which people are focused horizontally on the customer and on improving value streams that deliver value across functions.

The act of deeply thinking through problems, energizing people, and aligning them toward a common goal is the only way to practice and develop real leadership ability.

Perfectionism is a disease. Procrastination is a disease. ACTION is the cure.

Don't let your tools become your process.

In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. —Ralph Nader, consumer advocate

The use of a good process that engages people is much more desirable, even if it does not initially achieve all the results.

Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.13

Vision without an Action is Illusion. Action without a Vision is Confusion.

Sometimes, people don’t need our homes to live in or our bodies to lean on. All they need are our hands to lift them up.

The sword doesn't change. So you have to adapt to the sword. You can't change your surroundings. They only change once you have changed.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

It is the mentor’s responsibility to create a safe and trusting space that enables a mentee to stretch and step outside their comfort zone, take risks, and show up authentically.

This is the ultimate chicken and the egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles... The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right.

The bigger problem was that I couldn’t see that I had a problem.” Bud paused for a moment, and then, leaning toward me, he said in a lower, even more earnest tone, “There is no solution to the problem of lack of commitment, for example, without a solution to the bigger problem — the problem that I can’t see that I’m not committed.

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today.

We are most effective when we are able to lean in fully to the resource of the other people in our lives.

QUIT = Quickly Uphold Important Things

Humans are not by nature solitary. They need to connect with other human beings to share dreams and fears, to lean on each other, to enhance each other.

If you want to increase productivity, cut the timeline in half.

We often meet someone and think they are “different” but people are not inherently different: our differences lie between us, not within us.

Becoming more self-aware is the necessary first step to bridging differences. Without it, you will not be able to identify or understand when you encounter differences that matter.

When we understand and appreciate the differences between us, we can leverage them to improve our conversations, deepen our learning, and spur creative thinking.

In his latest book, General Colin Powell explains that his vision of leadership rejects “busy bastards” who put in long hours at the office without realizing the impact they have on their staff.

term Lean was coined by John Krafcik in a 1988 article based on his master’s thesis at MIT Sloan School of Management1 and then popularized in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking summarized Womack and Jones’s findings from studying how Toyota operates, an approach that was spearheaded by Taiichi Ohno, codified by Shigeo Shingo, and strongly influenced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Henry Ford, and U.S. grocery stores. Lean Thinking framed Toyota’s

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

Millennial women are less likely than Millennial men to agree that the statement "I aspire to a leadership role in whatever field I ultimately work" descried them very well. Millennial women were also less likely than their male peers to characterize themselves as "leaders," "visionaries," "self-confident," and "willing to take risks." (p.16)

We have to remember that the ancient faith communities that set a course to change the history of the world did so without church programs, without paid staff, without Web sites, and without brochures, blogs, or buildings. They were lean! The point of going without all the stuff is simple but profound. When you don’t have all the “stuff,” you’re left with a lot of time to spend with people.

I lent my ear to the patient's lips - so close that I could feel his fetid, warm breath on my skin. "Can you tell me where I can find Señora Jucinta Coronado?" I asked for the last time. I was afraid he'd bite me. Instead he emitted a violently loud fart. His companions burst out laughing and clapped with joy. I took a few steps back, but it was too late: the flatulent vapours had hit me. It was then that I noticed, close to me, an old man, all hunched up, with a prophet's beard, thin hair, and fiery eyes, who was leaning on a walking stick and gazing at the others with disdain. "You're wasting your time, young man. Juanito only knows how to let off farts, and the others can only laugh and smell them. As you see, the social structure here isn't very different from that of the outside world.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.

Kate leaned toward me. “What I need most when I’m in the box is to feel justified. Justification is what my box eats, as it were, in order to survive. And if I’d spent my whole night, and really a lot longer even than that, blaming my son, what did I need from my son in order to feel ‘justified,’ to feel ‘right’?” “You needed him to be wrong,” I said slowly, a knot forming in my stomach. “In order to be justified in blaming him, you needed him to be blame worthy.

At last, somebody in line steps forward. “I can commit,” he says. He’s a tall, lean young man with a rifle slung over his back. “What’s your name?” Chris asks. “Andrew,” he replies. “And I’m in.” Chris nods. A few other guys step forward and, after a few moments, the entire crowd of ex-POWs takes one step, signifying their decision. My chest swells with pride – pride for Chris’s leadership, pride for the people willing to give their lives to take down Omega. It’s a rush.

declaring that he had made Virginia, under his leadership, “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.”18 The real hell was yet to come. In the winter of 1609–10, five hundred colonists, having failed to farm or fish or hunt and having succeeded at little except making their neighbors into enemies, were reduced to sixty. “Many, through extreme hunger, have run out of their naked beds being so lean that they looked like anatomies, crying out, we are starved, we are starved,” wrote the

Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not - and should not have to - aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

Nearly two decades later, on his final day in office, President Clinton had issued Rich a highly unusual pardon. It was unusual because the pardon was given to a fugitive, which was, to my knowledge, unprecedented. It was also unusual, and suspicious, because it had not gone through the normal review process at the Department of Justice. The pardon had only been seen by then–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who, without seeking input from the prosecutors or agents who knew the case, cryptically told the White House he was “neutral, leaning positive.” The New York Times editorial board called the pardon “a shocking abuse of federal power.

Under the leadership of religious professionals, modern worship has become passive—listening to a message and singing some songs. Seldom is there a call to service or an invitation to trust Christ. Baptisms take place inside the church where it is safe and comfortable rather than in public where there is opportunity to give witness to the saving grace of Christ. The great needs of society are left to para-church groups, government agencies, and other social service organizations. All the while the church is losing its muscle tone, its biceps are becoming loose and flabby and its belly is becoming round and soft. Not a pretty picture for one who once was toned and buff—a lean, mean fighting machine.

There are several explanations offered as to why women have lower aspirations than men, including that women feel there is a lack of fit between themselves (their personal characteristics) and senior leadership positions, which are often characterized in highly masculine terms; women feel there are too many obstacles to overcome; women do not want to prioritize career over family; women place less important than do men on job characteristics common to senior roles, such as high pay, power, and prestige; gender role socialization influences girls' and women's attitudes and choices about occupational achievement; and women are more often located in jobs that lack opportunities for advancement and they lower their aspirations in response to this disadvantageous structural position. (p.191)

Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind,” she said. “We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.”7 If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent. Since people want to hire and promote those who are both competent and nice, this creates a huge stumbling block for women. Acting in stereotypically feminine ways makes it difficult for women to reach for the same opportunities as men, but defying expectations and reaching for those opportunities leads to being judged as undeserving and selfish.

It’s my proof that others are as blameworthy as I’ve claimed them to be — and that I’m as innocent as I claim myself to be. The behavior I complain about is the very behavior that justifies me.” Bud placed both hands on the table and leaned toward me. “So simply by being in the box,” he said slowly and earnestly, “I provoke in others the very behavior I say I hate in them. And they then provoke in me the very behavior they say they hate in me.” Bud turned and added another sentence to the principles about self-betrayal: “Self-betrayal” 1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of “self-betrayal.” 2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal. 3. When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted. 4. So—when I betray myself, I enter the box. 5. Over time, certain boxes become characteristic of me, and I carry them with me. 6. By being in the box, I provoke others to be in the box. 7. In the box, we invite mutual mistreatment and obtain mutual justification. We collude in giving each other reason to stay in the box.

investigations and reported the completion of significant investigations without charges. Anytime a special prosecutor is named to look into the activities of a presidential administration it is big news, and, predictably, my decision was not popular at the Bush White House. A week after the announcement, I substituted for the attorney general at a cabinet meeting with the president. By tradition, the secretaries of state and defense sit flanking the president at the Cabinet Room table in the West Wing of the White House. The secretary of the treasury and the attorney general sit across the table, flanking the vice president. That meant that, as the substitute for the attorney general, I was at Vice President Dick Cheney’s left shoulder. Me, the man who had just appointed a special prosecutor to investigate his friend and most senior and trusted adviser, Scooter Libby. As we waited for the president, I figured I should be polite. I turned to Cheney and said, “Mr. Vice President, I’m Jim Comey from Justice.” Without turning to face me, he said, “I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” Cheney then locked his gaze ahead, as if I weren’t there. We waited in silence for the president. My view of the Brooklyn Bridge felt very far away. I had assured Fitzgerald at the outset that this was likely a five- or six-month assignment. There was some work to do, but it would be a piece of cake. He reminded me of that many times over the next four years, as he was savagely attacked by the Republicans and right-leaning media as some kind of maniacal Captain Ahab, pursuing a case that was a loser from the beginning. Fitzgerald had done exactly as I expected once he took over. He investigated to understand just who in government had spoken with the press about the CIA employee and what they were thinking when they did so. After careful examination, he ended in a place that didn’t surprise me on Armitage and Rove. But the Libby part—admittedly, a major loose end when I gave him the case—

In the United States, where we pride ourselves on liberty and justice for all, the gender division of leadership roles is not much better.

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

Stephen Covey says: “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success, leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall”.

the most serious barrier is to be found in organizational culture, leadership, and strategy.

I thought (...) the proverbial glass ceiling had been cracked (...) and I believed that it was just a matter of time until my generation took our fair share of the leadership roles.

The pipeline that supplies the educated workforce is clock-full of women at the entry level, but by the time that same pipeline is filling leadership positions, it is overwhelmingly stocked with men.

Men of all ages must commit to changing the leadership ratios. They can start by actively seeking out qualified female candidates to hire and promote. And if qualified candidates cannot be found, then we need to invest in more recruiting, mentoring, and sponsoring so women can get the necessary experience.

Professor Gruenfeld was able to explain the price women pay for success: "Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double blind," she said. "We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they *should* be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.

From my travels around the country, I’ve noticed that the GOP has two distinct but related problems with women voters. First, many GOP-leaning women are apathetic. They may have previously voted with Republicans, but they’ve become disenchanted or perhaps have just disengaged.

Teams need both leadership and management. Popular author Stephen R. Covey explains: Leadership deals with direction—with making sure that the ladder is leaning against the right wall. Management deals with speed. To double one’s speed in the wrong direction, however, is the very definition of foolishness. Leadership deals with vision—with keeping the mission in sight—and with effectiveness and results. Management deals with establishing structure and systems to get those results. It focuses on efficiency, cost-benefit analyses, logistics, methods, procedures, and policies.[6]

Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind,” she said. “We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.

In the absence of those predictions, product and strategy decisions are far more difficult and time-consuming. I often see this in my consulting practice. I’ve been called in many times to help a startup that feels that its engineering team “isn’t working hard enough.” When I meet with those teams, there are always improvements to be made and I recommend them, but invariably the real problem is not a lack of development talent, energy, or effort. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently. Thus the downward cycle begins: the product development team valiantly tries to build a product according to the specifications it is receiving from the creative or business leadership. When good results are not forthcoming, business leaders assume that any discrepancy between what was planned and what was built is the cause and try to specify the next iteration in greater detail. As the specifications get more detailed, the planning process slows down, batch size increases, and feedback is delayed. If a board of directors or CFO is involved as a stakeholder, it doesn’t take long for personnel changes to follow.

A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers; it was in the process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged with feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.

truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions. And contrary to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it to the top, the majority of the most successful female business leaders have partners. Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.12 Many of these CEOs said they “could not have succeeded without the support of their husbands, helping with the children, the household chores, and showing a willingness to move.”13 Not surprisingly,

Like me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Program, was encouraged to prioritize marriage over career. As she described in The Atlantic, “When I was 27, I received a posh fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and work at the Wall Street Journal. … It was an incredible opportunity for a 20-something by any objective standard, and I knew it would help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My girlfriends, however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my boyfriend at the time to live abroad for a year. My relatives asked whether I was worried that I’d never get married. And when I attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took me aside to remind me that ‘there aren’t many guys like that out there.’ ” The result of these negative reactions, in Gayle’s view, is that many women “still see ambition as a dirty word.”20 Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not—and should not have to—aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

Even worse, the messages sent to girls can move beyond encouraging superficial traits and veer into explicitly discouraging leadership. When a girl tries to lead, she is often labeled bossy. Boys are seldom called bossy because a boy taking the role of a boss does not surprise or offend. As someone who was called this for much of my childhood, I know that it is not a compliment.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Senior management is simply a flag bearer when a business decision is made. It is of no use unless others follow the flag. —Eiji Toyoda, former chairman of Toyota

Women can enter (...) negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

Feeling threatened by others' choices pulls us all down. Instead, we should funnel our energy into breaking this cycle.

Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today. It is a capacity that is critical in situations of disruptive change, not only for institutions and systems, but also for teams and individuals.

Seeking out diverse experiences is useful preparation for leadership.

In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall

I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions.

Millennial women are less likely than Millennial men to agree that the statement “I aspire to a leadership role in whatever field I ultimately work” describes them very well. Millennial women were also less likely than their male peers to characterize themselves as “leaders,” “visionaries,” “self-confident,” and “willing to take risks.

In addition to the external barriers erected by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives - the messages that say it's wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet. Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions. This is not a list of things other women have done. I have made every mistake on this list. At times, I still do. My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Others have argued that women can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. We will march into our bosses' offices and demand what we need, including pregnancy parking. Or better yet, we'll become bosses and make sure all women have what they need. The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right. So rather than engage in philosophical arguments over which comes first, let's agree to wage battles on both fronts. They are equally important. I am encouraging women to address the chicken, but I fully support those who are focusing on the egg. Internal obstacles are rarely discussed and often underplayed. Throughout my life, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. I rarely heard anything, however, about the ways I might hold myself back. These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.

Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change. Such leaders encourage their teams to work toward a common goal through their vision, values, communication, example-setting, and their evident caring about their followers’ personal needs.

Vision. Has a clear understanding of where the organization is going and where it should be in five years. Inspirational communication. Communicates in a way that inspires and motivates, even in an uncertain or changing environment. Intellectual stimulation. Challenges followers to think about problems in new ways. Supportive leadership. Demonstrates care and consideration of followers’ personal needs and feelings. Personal recognition. Praises and acknowledges achievement of goals and improvements in work quality; personally compliments others when they do outstanding work.

(Inspirational communication) ​–​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. ​–​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership)

Here Jannes meets on a regular cadence with his direct reports, where they can quickly see and understand the status of each of his strategic objectives. Four distinct zones are visualized: strategic improvement, performance monitoring, portfolio roadmap, and leadership actions, each with current

Lean-Agile Leadership describes how Lean-Agile leaders drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Dheeraj explained to me that when leaders don’t have the skills to lean into vulnerability, they’re not able to successfully hold the tension of the paradoxes that are inherent in entrepreneurship. His examples of the paradoxes that elicit vulnerability in leaders align with what we heard from the research participants: Optimism and paranoia Letting chaos reign (the act of building) and reining in chaos (the act of scaling) Big heart and tough decision making Humility and fierce resolve Velocity and quality when building new things Left brain and right brain Simplicity and choice Thinking global, acting local Ambition and attention to detail Thinking big but starting small Short-term and long-term Marathons and sprints, or marathon of sprints in business-building Dheeraj told me, “Leaders must learn the skills to hold these tensions and get adept at “balancing on the ‘tightrope’ of life. Ultimately, leadership is the ability to thrive in the ambiguity of paradoxes and opposites

Agile Methodology: Learn from how terror networks work. AGILE methodology is about being able to iterate and reiterate till you get it right. You are always at the start and the end at the same time till the launch. You are more nimble than the waterfall method and more resourceful than the lean method.

My leader or manager: (Vision) ​–​Has a clear understanding of where we are going. ​–​Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in five years. ​–​Has a clear idea of where the organization is going. (Inspirational communication) ​–​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. ​–​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership) ​–​Considers my personal feelings before acting. ​–​Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs. ​–​Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration. (Personal recognition) ​–​Commends me when I do a better than average job. ​–​Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work. ​–​Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work.

The Times celebration of Brown as confirming constitutional color blindness was widely shared in America. In the debates over the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights bill in 1963 and 1964, the bipartisan congressional leadership appealed to the classical liberal model of color-blind justice, leaning over backwards to deny charges by southern opponents that the law could lead to quotas or other forms of preference for minorities. Indeed, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act shows what John David Skrentny, author of The Ironies of Affirmative Action, called “an almost obsessive concern” for maintaining fidelity to a color-blind concept of equal individual rights. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the majority (Democratic) whip behind the bill, explained simply: “Race, religion and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.” Title VII required employers to treat citizens differing in race, sex, national origin, or religion equally, as abstract citizens differing only in merit. Section 703(j) of the Civil Rights Act states: “Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which my exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by an employer.” The syntax was classic legalese, but the meaning was unambiguous. The Senate’s floor managers for Title VII, Joseph S. Clark (D-Pa.) and Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.), told their colleagues, “The concept of discrimination… is clear and simple and has no hidden meanings. …To discriminate means to make a distinction, to make a difference in treatment or favor, which is based on any five of the forbidden criteria: race, color, religion, sex, or nation origin.” They continued: There is no requirement in Title VII that an employer maintain a balance in his work force. On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a racial balance, whatever such a balance may be, would involve a violation of Title VII because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or refuse to hire on the basis of race. It must be emphasized that discrimination is prohibited to any individual. Humphrey, trying to lay to rest what he called the “bugaboo” of racial quotas raised by filibustering southerners in his own party and by some conservative Republicans as well, reaffirmed the bill’s color-blind legislative intent: “That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent. In fact the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it sways that race, religion, and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.” Humphrey even famously pledged on the Senate floor that if any wording could be found in Title VII “which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, … I will start eating the pages [of the bill] one after another.

Donald Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

I'm sorry to break this to you, but the best gift you can give your teammates is a messy, hard-to-measure, unscoped project. This kind of project creates the biggest opportunity for someone to grow as a leader, because it: hones folks' problem solving abilities, forces them to lean on more people around them, and stretches them into new leadership skills faster than small, simple projects do.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

In a drought-stricken town, a group of old men gather in the town square to pray for rain. One man brings his young son along and asks him to keep quiet while the older men are praying. With a hundred men kneeling with their eyes shut, the boy stands up to look at them. After a while, he leans over to his father, whispering in his ear: ‘Do these men really believe it will rain?’ ‘Of course,’ says his father. ‘These are good, God-fearing men. We’re here because we believe in the power of prayer.’ ‘But, Dad, why then has no one brought an umbrella?

Well, it seems contradictory. Is God going to destroy us or bless us?” “Could it be a little bit of both?” the old man asked. “Look, gentlemen, the truth is that God loves the people of Iran. He has a beautiful future planned for us. He promises to bless us in the last days. But before he can bless us, he has to purify us. Which means he is going to judge our political leaders and our religious leaders and our military leaders. He’s going to break them and shatter them and consume them. Not all the people, but the leaders. See how he specifically refers to the ‘king and princes’? The Lord is talking here about judging the leadership of the country. Not the people. Quite the contrary. The Lord says he is going to restore our fortunes and move his throne here—right here, in Iran.” Ali and Ibrahim were silent, poring over the text and trying to grasp the magnitude of its importance. “Can you imagine?” Birjandi asked. “Are you saying that after God judges our leaders and military, he’s going to allow the people of Iran to become politically free and economically prosperous?” Ali asked. “That’s one interpretation, and I would certainly love to believe that. However, I lean more toward the interpretation that God specifically means he will bless the people of Iran spiritually. I believe he is going to pour out his love and forgiveness and his Holy Spirit on the people of Iran. He’s going to open their hearts and their eyes and help them to see clearly that Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord in this world. And when he says

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say “We have done this ourselves.” —Lao-Tsu, founder of Daoism

Toyota’s concept of a good process is one that expects and reveals problems, without blame, not one that is problem-free.