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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Thurman American Buddhist Scholar
- Dero A. Saunders American Journalist
- Randolph Bourne American Writer
- Richard Livingstone British Scholar
- John Kotter American Management Consultant
- Shantideva Indian Buddhist Scholar
- Adam Clarke British Methodist Scholar
- Petrarch Italian Scholar
- Louis Leo Snyder American-born German Scholar
- A. E. Housman English Scholar, Poet
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