Pioneering Leadership Quotes

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To win the big stakes in this changed world, you must catch the spirit of the great pioneers of the past, whose dreams have given to civilization all that it has of value, the spirit that serves as the life-blood of our own country – your opportunity and mine, to develop and market our talents.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
Critics are loud, but success is louder.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An entrepreneur is a leader of excellence, trailblazer and pioneer who constantly brings change to their generation.
Onyi Anyado
The future will be envisioned and built collaboratively—or not at all.
Scilla Elworthy (Pioneering the Possible: Awakened Leadership for a World That Works (Sacred Activism Book 7))
I've always been 15 to 20 years ahead. As one of the first publishers to publish digitally in 2000 to become a digital publishing pioneer, before the Kindle and the height of digital book publishing in 2012-2015; I had digital books published, was one of the first on Amazon as an independent publisher, and became a beta for them years later. 20 Years before streaming networks like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu became the giants that they are in streaming; I envisioned a digital library of films and videos (even wrote about one in a scenario in my contemporary fiction book Loving Summer years later), which now became a form of streaming on-demand video today. This all comes from vision, being able to see far ahead through imagination as well as real evidence. When you can see this; you are truly blessed and gifted." Kailin Gow, Futurist, STEM Books Bestselling Award-winning Author and Publisher
Kailin Gow
When your faith is great and your confidence is overwhelming, the mountains will never stand before you
Prof.Salam Al Shereida
If you lacked ubuntu, … you lacked an indispensable ingredient to being human. You might have much of the world’s goods, and you might have position and authority, but if you did not have ubuntu, you did not amount to much.18
Scilla Elworthy (Pioneering the Possible: Awakened Leadership for a World That Works (Sacred Activism Book 7))
The world is in crisis. It needs people who have the skill to combine inner power with outer action. Inner power comes from self mastery, observing and controlling the ego, and deepening integrity through a regular practice of reflection or meditation.
Scilla Elworthy (Pioneering the Possible: Awakened Leadership for a World That Works (Sacred Activism Book 7))
Some practitioners spend too much effort trying to get the strategy and methodology right rather than looking for the right person to invest in. If someone says to me, give me the method or give me the curriculum, I know they have not understood that this is accomplished through persons rather than through methods.
Steve Addison (Pioneering Movements: Leadership That Multiplies Disciples and Churches)
Black women have long been the backbone of our political progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who've gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they've been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they've bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.
Rebecca Traister (Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger)
If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.
Brad Stone (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire)
DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again.
Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
Many church-planting pioneers have opted to start a church and create their own problems rather than inherit problems like the ones facing those pastors. Here’s the rub. In an attempt to create structures that allow greater leadership freedom (which is a good thing), many have opted for structures that include little formal accountability (which is a bad thing). Instead of a church model where the leader answers to everyone, some have created a leadership model where they answer to no one. It’s a recipe for dysfunction and disaster when a leader is organizationally and relationally isolated. My observation is that a leader who is isolated organizationally is twice as isolated relationally.
Lance Witt (Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul)
As it turned out, my church sent their youth to summer camps more to gain a vision of social justice than of personal religious experience. I was elected to represent Oklahoma at a regional church youth camp in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There the national youth leadership outlined their plan for the future and taught us about the labor movement, grasping capitalists and the need for total disarmament. From then on my intellectual trajectory was poised for leaping much further to the political left. That meant Henry Wallace and the Farmer Labor wing go of the Democratic Party. Those hurdles happened abruptly, and my course was set early. The national Methodist youth movement was a world of its own, with extensive organization and strong political convictions. It was designed for propaganda that promoted social change according to the Social Gospel vision pouring out of the theological schools. My distant ideological mentors for that dream were socialist candidate Norman Thomas, pacifist pioneer A. J. Muste and British Hyde Park Donald Soper. I got this indoctrination second- and third-hand from reading and from going to youth conferences on all levels--local, district, conference, jurisdictional and national levels. As a teenage I was not sufficiently self-critical to see any unintended consequences and such talk was not encouraged.
Thomas C. Oden (A Change of Heart)
To make any vision a reality, a mission leader needs the confidence in herself to persist regardless of the naysayers. She needs the will to persevere when obstacles seem insurmountable.
Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
A mission leader recognizes that while she can progress independently, momentum only occurs when people align with, act on, and amplify a message. The amplification makes a messenger’s mission multiply and eventually creates a movement worth following.
Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
A mission leader listens, and as a consequence, is heard. She has the power to mobilize people who are engaged or to bring those who hide in dark corners into the light.
Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
Accept yourself. Accept yourself with confidence. Accept yourself with confidence and courage. Do this and you are destined to be a leader or a pioneer.
Lawren Leo (Horse Magick: Spells and Rituals for Self-Empowerment, Protection, and Prosperity)
Salesforce.com, a $1 billion software firm that has pioneered software as a service, has been making the shift from the logic of addition to the logic of multiplication. They enjoyed a decade of outstanding growth using the old idea of “throwing resources at a problem.” They addressed new customers and new demands by hiring the best technical and business talent available and deploying them on the challenges. However, a strained market environment created a new imperative for the company’s leadership: get more productivity from their currently available resources. They could no longer operate on outdated notions of resource utilization. They started developing leaders who could multiply the intelligence and capability of the people around them and increase the brainpower of the organization to meet their growth demands.
Liz Wiseman (Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter)
Role Modeling and Meaningful Mentors Given the importance of socialization in leadership education and the power of analogue to organize people's approaches, one important facet of training the next generation of impact investors is to celebrate role models. Historically business schools have exposed students to leading businesspeople who have exemplified a model life in which their business success was followed by a retirement enriched by charity work. Now the increasing popularity on business school campuses of impact investing pioneers is offering an alternative model for students to follow. Schools that recognize the importance of mentoring and role modeling will need to identify additional opportunities to expose students to similarly forward-looking role models. Beyond the charismatic entrepreneurs, role models can also come from the leaders of networks, standard-setting bodies and other industry-builders who will increasingly represent high-leverage leadership in the impact investing industry's next phase.
Antony Bugg-Levine (Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference)
Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.
Hank Bracker
public statements condemning segregation, sharply worded telegrams to Washington, and meetings with White House officials—were demonstrably ineffectual. New and more dramatic measures were in order. Mass action, Randolph reasoned, would be required, and he proposed a protest of 10,000 black people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and exclusion from jobs in the defense industry. Drawing on community organizing and protest networks developed during the 1920s and 1930s, this would be a broad, national mobilization of African Americans. The substance of their demand would be full and equal participation in the national defense effort, and the form of the demand would be a mass mobilization designed to compel the federal government to action. The MOWM, in effect, pioneered the type of protest politics that was used to considerable effect during the civil rights movement to push the federal government to enforce or enact African American citizenship rights. Randolph announced the March on Washington proposal in a January 1941 statement to the press. He declared that “power and pressure do not reside in the few, and intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.… Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definitive purpose.” 19 Two months later Randolph issued the official call for the march, set for July 1, 1941. Drawing on his standing as a prominent black leader, and especially as the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Randolph made his case that the time was right. “In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure,” he wrote in the call to march. “To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHTING FORCES.” 20 To coordinate this massive effort, organizers established a March on Washington Committee, headed by Randolph, along with a sponsoring committee and regional committees in cities across the country. Galvanized by a rising desire for action within black communities, the idea found enthusiastic approval in the black press and eventually won the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and other elements of black leadership. 21 By the end of May, Randolph estimated that 100,000 black Americans would march. A national grassroots movement was afoot, and Randolph grew even more confident in his vision for the demonstration. “Let the Negro masses march!” he declared. “Let the Negro masses speak!” 22
Stephen Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
For the practices pioneered or perfected by McDonald’s under Ray Kroc’s leadership have revolutionized an entire food service industry, changed eating habits throughout the world, and raised customer expectations. Who among us is not now less tolerant of slow service, overpriced meals, soggy french fries, or a lack of cleanliness in eating places? Mr.
Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)
Have you ever dared to imagine what life could be like … if we used our skills to transform conflict, to clean up the environment, and to invent a financial system that is fair? How it would be if we set up systems for wise governance, if we kicked out the cynics and gave medals to people who outlaw corruption? What would life be like if we were to bring the feminine and masculine into balance, to free women from millennia of oppression and release their creativity? What if we were able to have a pace of life that suited the soul? This book is your invitation. How This Book Works The foundation of this book is the leap in human consciousness. This first chapter introduces the ideas that propelled me to write it and describes my own journey. Chapter 2 will try to get as close as possible to a vision of what this leap is. Chapter 3 then takes us to meet some living examples of people who have done this—great people who have developed their self-awareness, shifted their consciousness, and become able to work for change in the world in a powerfully effective way. These are individuals who have dealt with the doubts and challenges of being a pioneer, such as speaking truth to power and picking yourself up when things fall apart. They have also, crucially, learned when skepticism is useful
Scilla Elworthy (Pioneering the Possible: Awakened Leadership for a World That Works (Sacred Activism Book 7))
An apostle is not a title! To be “apostolic” simply explains that you are gifted with a specific function, which includes your commission to pioneer new frontiers as well as to take leadership initiative with wisdom and passion. A gift can never be mistaken with reward! Your gift does not define you; so don’t let people call you Mr. Prophet!
François Du Toit (The Mirror Bible)
Life is not a spectator sport. Build a career as a pioneer and inspirational force of good leading the way for others to follow through your passion, community work and career.
Germany Kent
My thesis here is that the climate of contemporary America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership. This regression, despite the plethora of self-help literature and the many well-intentioned human rights movements, is characterized principally by a devaluing and denigration of the well-differentiated self. It has lowered people’s pain thresholds, with the result that comfort is valued over the rewards of facing challenge, symptoms come in fads, and cures go in and out of style like clothing fashions. Perhaps most important, however, is this: in contrast to the Renaissance spirit of adventure that was excited by encounter with novelty, American civilization’s emotional regression has perverted the élan of risk-taking discovery and pioneering that originally led to the foundations of our nation. As a result, its fundamental character has instead been shaped into an illusive and often compulsive search for safety and certainty. This is occurring equally in parenting, medicine, and management. The anxiety is so deep within the emotional processes of our nation that it is almost as though a neurosis has become nationalized.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
As leaders you can never tell people that they are empowered, all you can do is to create the environment and give people the skills and tools to enable them to grow. You feel valued for the part that you play and from that you breed loyalty. Loyalty not only to the team, the leadership, but to the organisation as a whole.
Mandy Hickson (An Officer, Not a Gentleman: The Inspirational Journey of a Pioneering Female Fighter Pilot)
superior results over the long term, including: unorthodox and rational asset class allocations; pioneering and logical strategies within each asset class; unconventional and timely commitments to out-of-favor asset classes; original and disciplined selection of little known asset managers; training and empowerment of relatively young professionals; sensible and innovative structures of investment manager relationships; and disciplined leadership in the integration of endowment management with the overall financial management of the university.
David F. Swensen (Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated)
I am happier because I believe good things are in my future and because I know that even if something bad happens, it is happening to bring me to a better place than I was before. -- Aneela Idnani Cofounder and President, Habit Aware
Christina D. Warner (The Art of Healthcare Innovation: Interviews and Industry Insights from 35 Game-Changing Pioneers)
You'll never wish you were more of a bastard. Treat everyone you encounter with respect, and they'll respect you and your business. Even more than respect, compassion goes a low way. -- Carl Natenstedt, CEO Z5 Inventory
Christina D. Warner (The Art of Healthcare Innovation: Interviews and Industry Insights from 35 Game-Changing Pioneers)
Your team comes first! It’s not your team’s job to adapt to you, it’s your job to adapt to them. You are as strong as the team you surround yourself with. They will be the reason you succeed, but they won’t be the reason you fail. -- Dr. Hitesh Tolani CEO AND FOUNDER, VIRTUDENT
Christina D. Warner (The Art of Healthcare Innovation: Interviews and Industry Insights from 35 Game-Changing Pioneers)
I think it’s important to be attentive to opportunities that might unexpectedly arise—and be prepared to take them. Practically, this means having broad interests, interacting with people from different professional backgrounds, and building a generalizable skillset that can be applied to different problems. -- Dennis Grishin, Cofounder and CSO Nebula Genomics
Christina D. Warner (The Art of Healthcare Innovation: Interviews and Industry Insights from 35 Game-Changing Pioneers)
The state leadership and the Jewish Agency feared for Israel’s character as a European pioneering society if Oriental immigration was to continue unchecked. The expected demographic change that would result from mass immigration from Oriental countries was at the heart of this fear. Such preoccupations were enhanced by the fact that, following the destruction of most of European Jewry, North Africa had become the main reservoir for new immigrants.107 As Yaron Tsur argues, this fear was partially material for the political decision makers. The Labor establishment was afraid that the new immigrants would strengthen the ranks of the Revisionist opposition.108 Yet fear of Levantinization was not simply a matter of quantitative aspects of Mizrachi immigration; it was also associated with qualitative aspects of what Ashkenazi officials imagined to be a “Levantine” way of life. In closed forums, they quite openly discussed the anticipated negative consequences for Israeli state building. During the discussions regarding selection guidelines for 1953, Giora Josephthal, the head of the Klitah (Absorption) Department of the Jewish Agency, stated, for instance: “I say that this land is in danger, its ethical and social existence are in danger because of this Aliyah [from Oriental countries]. . . . They say that life in Israel will obtain a Levantine character, I am convinced that some of us are already afraid of the immigrants.
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
Leaders in the age of superintelligence must not only pioneer the frontiers of technology but also bear the weight of guiding humanity through uncharted territory, ensuring that wisdom prevails in harnessing AI's immense power for the greater good.
Farshad Asl
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. —WARREN BENNIS, American scholar, organizational consultant, and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of leadership studies
Danielle Harlan (The New Alpha: Join the Rising Movement of Influencers and Changemakers Who are Redefining Leadership)
Leadership does not particularly belong to men. History has shown, that most of our leaders, and pioneers are women.
Petra Hermans
When leaders don't find the way, find new leaders.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
This finding is by no means unusual. In their book Will and Vision, Gerard J. Tellis and Peter N. Golder looked at the relationship between long-term market leadership and pioneering innovation in sixty-six different commercial sectors. They found that only 9 percent of the pioneers ended up as the final winners. They also found that 64 percent of pioneers failed outright.16
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do)
As we navigate the transformative era of Generative AI, let us leverage this powerful technology to redefine the boundaries of possibility, fostering creativity, efficiency, and growth. In this journey, we are not merely participants but pioneers, shaping a future where business and technology converge to unlock new realms of human achievement.
Farshad Asl