Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Warren Bennis (American Management Consultant)

Warren Gamaliel Bennis (1925–2014) was an American business academic, organizational consultant, and author. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary discipline of leadership studies.

Born to a working-class Jewish family in New York City’s Bronx, Bennis served in the United States Army during World War I. After the war, he attended Antioch College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He held academic positions in various American institutions and served as chair of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.

As an academic and a leadership consultant, Bennis was instrumental in bringing a new rigor to the study of leadership. He was an adviser to four U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, wrote over twenty books on the topic of leadership and lectured and consulted all over the world.

Bennis’s notable works include On Becoming a Leader (1989,) Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (1997,) Managing People is Like Herding Cats (1999,) Leading for a Lifetime (2007,) and the autobiography Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership (2014.)

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The best thing a leader can do for a great group is to allow its members to discover their greatness.
Warren Bennis

There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Information

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Doing Your Best, Vision

We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Knowledge

Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work… I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn’t make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Emotions

You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Vision

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Ideas, Excellence, Example

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don’t think that’s quite it; it’s more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there’s any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it’s surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that’s constant is change.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them.
Warren Bennis

Leaders learn by leading, and they learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Intensity coupled with commitment is magnetic.
Warren Bennis

Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Vision, Leadership, Leaders

Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leaders, Leadership

There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.
Warren Bennis
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Creativity

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Heroism, Problem-solving, Realism, Heroes

The manager administers; the leader innovates. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leaders, Challenges, Leadership

Groups become great only when everyone in them, leaders and members alike, is free to do his or her absolute best.
Warren Bennis

Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Trust

Managers have their eyes on the bottom line; leaders have their eyes on the horizon.
Warren Bennis

What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Truth, Leadership

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 Bennis
Topics: Future, Will, Dogs, Act

Innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires ‘courageous patience’.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Innovation

Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Success

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership

The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure – something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom—as something they thought was almost a necessity. It’s as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership, Resilience

Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers are people who do things right … a profound difference.
Warren Bennis
Topics: Leadership, Leaders

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