Warren Bennis Quotes

Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.

Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.

...once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals...

The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

More leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. —WARREN G. BENNIS,

Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.

Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept.

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.

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.

To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing

The first step in becoming a leader, then, is to recognize the context for what it is—a breaker, not a maker; a trap, not a launching pad; an end, not a beginning—and declare your independence.

Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – and the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.

A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, 'I guess you want my resignation?' Watson said, 'You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you!

Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive. —HOWARD THURMAN

The seven manifestations of broken bonding are psychosomatic illness, violence and aggression, addiction, depression, burnout, stress reaction, and organizational conflict.

The son knows about himself as a masculine figure through the eyes of the mother, not the eyes of the father.

leadership that knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its workforce.

successful leadership takes conscious development and requires being true to your life story.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. There is no doubt you can learn from their experiences, but there is no way you can be successful trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.  – Warren H. Bennis

Pursuing purpose with passion • Practicing solid values • Leading with heart • Establishing enduring relationships • Demonstrating self-discipline

The ideal boss for a growing leader is probably a good boss with major flaws, so that one can learn all the complex lessons of what to do and what not to do simultaneously.

The capacity to develop close and enduring relationships is one mark of a leader.

Self-reliant loners, who think they can do everything on their own, often make fatal mistakes and decisions.

True North is the internal compass that guides you successfully through life.

Most people are driven by fear or by avoidance of pain. Only a few are driven by the benefits.

In 1989, the Internet’s 400 early adopters were predicting that it would revolutionize how people communicate,

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. —HELEN KELLER

First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that. Be what you are, and don’t lose it. . . . It’s very hard to be who we are, because it doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants.” But, of course, as Lear has demonstrated, it’s the only way to truly fly.

Contrary to popular myth, great teams are not characterized by an absence of conflict. On the contrary, in my experience, one of the most reliable indicators of a team that is continually learning is the visible conflict of ideas. In great teams conflict becomes productive.”1

It would be more accurate to say that we see with our brain rather than with our eyes. However, the more interesting point is that the brain does not always need to receive information through the eyes in order to “see.” It can recall sights, sounds, and feelings from memory and run the whole sequence like a movie, all inside our head, in the mind’s eye.

One thing Great Groups do need is protection. Great Groups do things that haven’t been done before. Most corporations and other traditional organizations say they want innovation, but they reflexively shun the untried. Most would rather repeat a past success than gamble on a new idea. Because Great Groups break new ground, they are more susceptible than others to being misunderstood, resented, even feared. Successful

Warren Bennis, one of today’s leading thinkers on the art of leadership, spent years studying groundbreaking groups such as the Walt Disney Studios (while Walt was still alive), Xerox PARC, and Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Here are some of the highlights from his study of groups: • Great groups believe they are on a mission from God. Beyond mere financial success, they genuinely believe they will make the world a better place. • Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. “And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more,” says Warren. • Great groups ship. “They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas.” Warren characterized the successful collaborations he studied as “dreams with deadlines.” Part

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

Developing a vision is an exercise in thinking big and long term—not in setting next year’s resolutions.

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

When you're in trouble and all your defenses get stripped away, you realize what matters and who matters. That's when you need to get back to your roots and to your values. —David Gergen, counselor to four U.S. presidents

As Warren Bennis observed in On Becoming a Leader, “The leader’s world view is always contagious. Carter depressed us; Reagan, whatever his other flaws, gave us hope.”17 Every day, you as a leader have a choice to make: “I am going to be a leader of optimism” or “I am going to be a leader of pessimism.” As Colin Powell has said, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”18 A positive outlook can take all the resources you possess and multiply them exponentially. Here’s why optimism wins:     •  Optimists are more confident, so they accept challenging

Former Lucky Stores CEO Don Ritchey said that difficult bosses really “test your beliefs, and you learn all the things you don’t want to do or stand for. I

Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus say that “trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.

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.

MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS The effective ones are the one-man shows.The institutional ones are disastrous. They waste time, cost money, demoralize and distract your best people, and don’t solve problems. They are people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is and then walk off with it. Don’t use them under any circumstances. Not even to keep your stockholders and directors quiet. It isn’t worth it. Many organizations who’ve been through it will react promptly, thoroughly, and effectively to the threat: “If you fellows don’t get shaped up in thirty days so you’re a credit to the rest of the company, I’m going to call in Booz, Allen.

Always hire people bigger than yourself. If you hire people bigger than yourself, we will become a company of giants. If you hire people smaller than yourself, we will become a company of dwarves.”14

forgiveness is actually for yourself: until you forgive, you carry the burden and the weight of the grief.

I was born in 1960. When you are eight or nine years old and you look at the TV set, men are landing on the moon, anything’s possible. And that’s something we should not lose sight of … the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge.

Traditionally, charisma was associated with religious and political leaders, not CEOs or school principals. This began to change in the mid-1980s. The tipping point was the appearance of two books in 1985: Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge and Bernard Bass’s influential Transformational Leadership: Industrial, Military, and Educational Impact. These authors broke with tradition and argued that charismatic (now “transformational”) leadership can be learned and practiced in settings ranging from schools to corporations to art museums. The transformational leader, they argued, unlocks human energy by creating a vision of a different reality and connecting that vision to people’s values and needs. These works were followed by a raft of books and articles in a similar vein: The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (1987), The Transformational Leader: The Key to Global Competitiveness

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.

A notable exception is the position taken by Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary in their Psychological Bulletin article, "The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental

There’s no point in being only the richest person in the graveyard. We must also enjoy ourselves along the way.

Boredom is what happens when I fail to make someone interesting

Leadership is the capacity to turn vision into reality.

George’s stories remind us that we are not victims of circumstance—we have the power to react. Our actions will always determine the outcome. That makes all the difference.

The fact is that when we are filled with anxiety and fear, this affects both mental and physical functioning and reduces our capacity to reach our highest level of performance.

The new leaders will not be content to sit back and let the cruise control do the driving. They will be looking forward, scanning the landscape, watching the competition, spotting emerging trends and new opportunities, avoiding impending crises. They will be explorers, adventurers, trailblazers. Advanced technology will give them an interactive, real-time connection with the marketplace; and they will get feedback from sensors at the peripheries of the organization. But they will be led just as much by their own intuition. Sometimes they will decide to ignore the data and drive by the seat of their pants. Tomorrow’s successful leaders will be what Warren Bennis calls ‘leaders of leaders’. They will decentralize power and democratize strategy by involving a rich mixture of different people from inside and outside the organization in the process of inventing the future.

Organizations are too often prisons for the human soul.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

performance-appraisal sheet would have looked like this: Adaptability 0 Adventuresomeness 100 Cruelty 100 Energy 100 Flexibility 0 Intelligence 100 Justice 100 Gets along well with others 0

The renowned leadership expert Warren Bennis, who authored 30 leadership books, including one of my favorites, On Becoming a Leader, indicated that: “a leader is not simply someone who experiences the personal exhilaration of being in charge. Instead, a leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people’s lives, for better or for worse, sometimes forever and ever.

The dream— a new kind of entertainment, a new political era, a radical new take on what learning is all about— is a kind of contract, a mutual understanding that the product, and even the process itself, will be worth the effort to create it.

Satchel Paige is supposed to have said, “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so”);

One way to make sure you test your intuition is to create and encourage a culture of dissent. By promoting strong people who will stand up to you and say no, you can create an environment in which your intuitions have to run the gauntlet of constructive criticism. For example, there was one veteran employee at the Haifa design center who was challenging me all the time. To be honest, I had extremely ambivalent feelings about this individual. It’s no fun to be constantly challenged and criticized. Yet in the end I was glad he was there. He kept me on my toes.

Our favorite example of meaning comes from a “Peanuts” cartoon strip. Lucy asks Schroeder—Schroeder playing the piano, of course, and ignoring Lucy—if he knows what love is. Schroeder stands at attention and intones, “Love: a noun, referring to a deep, intense, ineffable feeling toward another person or persons.” He then sits down and returns to his piano. The last caption shows Lucy looking off in the distance, balefully saying, “On paper, he’s great.” Most mission statements suffer that same fate: On paper, they’re great.

Communities based on merit and passion are rare, and people who have been in them never forget them. And then there is the sheer exhilaration of performing greatly. Talent wants to exercise itself, needs to. People pay a price for their membership in Great Groups. Postpartum depression is often fierce, and the intensity of collaboration is a potent drug that may make everything else, including everything after, seem drab and ordinary. But no one who has participated in one of these adventures in creativity and community seems to have any real regrets. How much better to be with other worthy people, doing worthy things, than to labor alone (

As one Great Group after another has shown, talented people don’t need fancy facilities. It sometimes seems that any old garage will do. But they do need the right tools. The leaders of PARC threatened to quit if the lab was not allowed to build the computer it needed, rather than accept an inferior technology. Cutting-edge technology is often a key element in creative collaboration. The right tools become part of the creative process.

In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

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

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. You

The Graduate.Will anybody of a certain age forget that scene when Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)

Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.

Leadership expert Warren Bennis says that "leadership is doing the right thing, while management is doing things right." This is a clever saying and gets you thinking about the distinctions between leading and managing.

Being a first-class noticer allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.

Being a first-class noticer allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.