Warren G Bennis Quotes

Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 (

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

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”);

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.

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.