Mark Rutland Quotes

Respecting the Past, Envisioning the Future, Seeing the Current Reality

Try to be all things to all people, and you may just wind up being nothing much to hardly anyone.

To align message with market is simply to communicate a message that resonates with your market.

Even in a desperate turnaround situation, if you shift your market radically and suddenly, you may lose the market you have before you can get a new one.

leadership, and particularly turnaround leadership, is about defining a dream and tethering all aspects of the organization to it.

The leader steps into an organization in its darkest hour and says, “Friends, you only thought this was your darkest hour. In fact, this is your greatest opportunity. Let me show you why that’s true.” Note

In your position as leader, your actions are amplified; it’s as if you are talking through a bullhorn every time you communicate with your employees. They hear your criticism more loudly than you mean it, and they hear your praise and thanks more loudly than it sounds to you. Use your bullhorn wisely.

...we must release God from any subconscious belief we have that He is indebted to us to run a better universe.

we can see that Jesus models an appropriate prayer protocol that begins and ends with praise. The praise at the first and the last is altogether conscious of who God is. The petitions are about human need, but the praise is about the divine character summarized in four words: holiness, kingship, power, and glory. Thy name is holy. Thine is the kingdom. Thine is the power. Thine is the glory. All four are about Him, not us, not our needs, not our sins, and not our service. So much of what passes for praise today is saccharine emotionalism, filled with narcissistic self-absorption. How I feel about God. How much I love God. How good His love makes me feel. How victorious God makes me. Me, me, me. The Lord’s Prayer begins and ends with God and God alone. His name. His kingdom. His power and His glory. Yes, in between God’s holiness and God’s glory I am free to express my needs, but what good are my petitions if God is not who He is?

One of the reasons you can’t learn everything you need to know about leadership from a seminar or a book is that leadership is, ultimately, an art.

If we begin to fear chaos and tighten down the controls too much, we’ll have order but no creativity and, well, no life.

The great leaders learn to rely on God to sustain them when nothing of this world can. And this, too, is the price—and the privilege—of leadership. Oh,