Pandemic Leadership Quotes

In any pandemic, effective leadership is critical, and the first responsibility of the president or the head of any nation is to offer accurate and up-to-date information, provided by public health experts, not agenda-oriented political operatives.

I doubt any politician could have led the country through the deadliest pandemic in a hundred years without making errors of judgment and execution. But of all the people in the world, President Trump was uniquely unsuited to the challenge. He lacked empathy and was stubborn and impatient. For all but the MAGA base, his aggressive personality made his leadership appear more erratic than inspirational.

This was a constant truth of the pandemic. Saving lives was always possible, if we chose to do it.

Everyone is trying to be famous and everyone is trying to trend. These people and the ones who are seeking attention on social media .They are more pandemic than corona virus, because they are misleading, hurting and destroying lot of lives while they are at it.

The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. . . . There is one core principle for developing these relationships. People must be engaged in meaningful work together if they are to transcend individual concerns and develop new capacities.

What we hope for includes the wise human leadership and initiative which will, like that of Joseph in Egypt, bring about fresh and healing policies and actions

People do not resist change, per se. People resist loss. You appear dangerous to people when you question their values, beliefs, or habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Although you may see with clarity and passion a promising future of progress and gain, people will see with equal passion the losses you are asking them to sustain.

We are in a season of disruption. We are in a season of rebirth. The two have much in common. What we once thought of as normal will never be again, but both disruption and rebirth provide opportunities to normalize entirely new realities...

Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.

Business and National leaders who lack the ability to come up with the visions of the future for their organizations and countries, with wishful thinking that the world will go back to normal, will lead their businesses and countries to Digital Extinction. Digital transformation is not an event, it is a series of disruptive events and any leader, business or national that thought, after the pandemic things will go back to normal, such thinking leaders have a perfect recipe to lead their organizations and countries through the shortcut to digital extinction.

Some of the things any incoming president should worry about are fast-moving: pandemics, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. But most are not. Most are like bombs with very long fuses that, in the distant future, when the fuse reaches the bomb, might or might not explode. It is delaying repairs to a tunnel filled with lethal waste until, one day, it collapses. It is the aging workforce of the DOE—which is no longer attracting young people as it once did —that one day loses track of a nuclear bomb. It is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

Companies that succeed have a founder or a leadership team that fundamentally understands their customers, sometimes even better than customers know themselves. They imagine what the customer wants before they know they want it, and they package it in a way that is irresistible. And, they manage well. xTV had the vision, but not the discipline.

There are no blueprints for how to lead in a world that was already deeply inequitable and that has, since March 2020, experienced both a pandemic and a collective outcry against systemic racism.

The old, the poor, and the sick were being relegated to 2nd class citizenship. Our real values are not the ones that disappear in hard times, they are the ones that show up in hard times. All it took was one little pandemic and we started writing people off.

hospitalization data away from the CDC and set up the new system, many in the media would almost reflexively cite the incident as support for a dominant narrative that the CDC was seeing its role obstructed and reduced by the political leadership at HHS and the White House.25 US senator Patty Murray sent HHS an oversight letter in which she argued that the new system was wasteful and “duplicates existing CDC work.”26 It was alleged that the Trump administration had taken the hospital reporting away from the CDC and given it to TeleTracking with a political not a public health goal in mind—political officials wanted to fudge the data to give a false rosy picture of the pandemic. Or so the narrative went. While the CDC was certainly subject to some deeply unfortunate and ultimately damaging political intrusions into its work, this wasn’t one of those instances. Some of the frustrations with the CDC’s execution had merit, and the CDC’s method for reporting COVID hospitalizations was one of those moments.

In America and the European Union, around a third of the public have college degrees. An even smaller share get postgraduate education, barely 13% in the United States. And yet most of the leadership positions in Western societies are held by people who have at least a college education and usually some postgraduate training. In other words, about two thirds of people stand by and watch as the other third run everything. (In large Asian countries, which have a smaller share of college graduates, the divide is arguably much greater. Just 10% of China’s population attended some college and yet virtually every member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee has—99% as of 2016.

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

The stories of people who are making sacrifices to help others during this crisis could fill an entire book. Around the world, health care workers put themselves at risk to treat sick people—according to the WHO, more than 115,000 had lost their lives taking care of COVID patients by May 2021. First responders and frontline workers kept showing up and doing their jobs. People checked in on neighbors and bought groceries for them when they couldn’t leave home. Countless people followed the mask mandates and stayed home as much as possible. Scientists worked around the clock, using all their brainpower to stop the virus and save lives. Politicians made decisions based on data and evidence, even though these decisions weren’t always the popular choice. Not everyone did the right thing, of course. Some people have refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. Some politicians have denied the severity of the disease, shut down attempts to limit its spread, and even implied that there’s something sinister in the vaccines. It’s impossible to ignore the impact their choices are having on millions of people, and there’s no better proof of those old political clichés: Elections have consequences, and leadership matters.

I had the added assurance of knowing I was buffered against catching the disease that I nursed, so sometimes Macabir's praise of my courage on this count embarrassed me. Then a journeyman healer walked boldly into the camp bearing sufficient serum to inoculate everyone.

The glitch was in his mental model of his own country, and its leadership. Every day brought him more evidence of their unwillingness to act on what he’d seen. On February 26, President Trump announced at a press conference that only fifteen Americans had been infected with the virus, and that “when you have fifteen people, and the fifteen within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” The next evening, taking questions after a White House meeting with African American leaders, Trump had simply declared, “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” The CDC, for its part, lagged about five steps behind where it should be.

In a crisis like COVID, information is not foresight. It takes exceptionally brave leadership to act decisively, before the full scale of a threat becomes obvious. By the time the situation is evident, it can be too late to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

Earlier only pizza used to come in 30 minutes. After a pandemic everything comes in less than 30 minutes.

Some days what doesn’t kill you just didn’t kill you and that’s all we wrote.

Trust me … as a lifetime award winning insomniac, I know that success doesn’t happen during or over nights. There’s a story behind the glory. We can write it or read it.

Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that’s being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership.

progressives. Nobody expects otherwise. In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

While many healthy churches are giving faithful witness to Christ across the globe, most leaders have not been trained for the challenge of trying to bring change to churches that need transformation in order to be faithful to their missional calling.

A system was groping toward a solution, but the solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn’t reward bravery. It was stuck in an infinite loop of first realizing that it was in need of courage and then remembering that courage didn’t pay. Charity didn’t think of it this way, but it was striking how often the system returned to her and very nearly sought her leadership, without ever formally acknowledging its need.

But the country’s experience during the pandemic is also a culmination of many of the things that had begun to distort our society for a number of years— gross inequality based on race and income, the growing distrust of expertise, a media addicted to promoting controversy, and a people long out of the habit of shared sacrifice for the common good.

We will need more of mental resilience; innovation, creative thinking and social connect to overcome and thrive post the COVID19 outbreak crisis.

For me, the legacy of COVID-19 will be that it was a much-needed wake-up call to effectuate change. It’s a forced overhaul of our current standards, norms, and expectations that collectively failed humanity. This pandemic could become a positive global genesis for a fundamentally better way to live and serve others.

This is the fire. We’re in it. JFK and Obama led us to the rainbow; Trump forced us into the fire. And then he poured gasoline on it. If only he had responded sooner and more intelligently to the pandemic. If only he’d been an unaffected opportunist instead of a slumlord on steroids. If only he’d never taken out full-page newspaper ads calling for the deaths of innocent Black men. If only he had or had not made a thousand choices that resulted in a critical dearth of leadership at a moment when leadership was desperately needed. If he’d set an example of competent

True leaders are servant leaders.

So the final lesson, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. Leadership must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.