From sense of urgency and patience to adaption and learning from failure. A fast way to become a better leader is to learn from others. Leadership books can be immensely inspiring. True wisdom stemming from decades of doing and thinking can often be elegantly expressed in a short quote. Here is the School of Herring selection of 100 leadership quotes.
As you open your mind for advice and for exploring the deeper meaning of a quote, get ready for contrasts. There is a yin and yang in everything.
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.” – George Santayana
The list below includes statements that contradict each other. That’s one reason why they are so inspiring. Each quote was absolutely true for the one who coined it. For you, these quotes may be true or they may not. If they test your conviction, they are doing their job.
“The sum of all startup advice you’ll ever read or get will amount to you being wrong on everything. This is why conviction matters.” – Aaron Levie
Culture
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. – Peter Drucker
Strategy
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. — Michael E. Porter
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. — Peter Drucker
Eighty percent of success is showing up. – Woody Allen
Being a leader
A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice. — James Callighan
Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.
The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.— Harvey S. Firestone
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. – Peter Drucker
Audacity beats predictability over the long haul. — Clay Shirky
Create your future from your future, not your past. — Werner Erhard
Leading people
Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. — Tom Peters
Management, is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. — Peter Drucker
Treat issues coldly and people warmly. — Anonymous
Managers lead everyone the same – leaders lead everyone differently. @JohnCMaxwell
If I take man as he is, I make him worse; if I take him as he ought to be, I make him become what he can be. — Viktor Frankl
If you have a yes man working for you, one of you is redundant. — Barry Rand
Correction does much, but encouragement does more. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No matter how small, acknowledge the achievement. — Greg Henry Quinn
If you measure me in an illogical way, do not complain about illogical behavior. — Eli Goldratt
Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots. — Frank A. Clark
Teamwork
If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. — African saying
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. — Michael Jordan
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. — Henry Ford
A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. — Steve Jobs
Working together always works. It always works. — Alan Mulally
Communities based on merit and passion are rare, and the people who have been in them never forget them. – Warren Bennis
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. — Mahatma Gandhi
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities. — Stephen Covey
Organizational malaise
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership. – Peter Drucker
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. – Peter Drucker
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work. – Peter Drucker
People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. – Peter Drucker
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb
I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell. — Harry S Truman
Managing change
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. — George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw
We must be the change we wish to see in the world. — Gandhi
The dangers in life are infinite, and among them is safety. — Goethe
Fear doesn’t drive change – but it does perpetuate mediocrity. — Jim Collins
Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have — and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up. — James Belasco
If we don’t change our direction we’re likely to end up where we’re headed. — Chinese proverb
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. — Picasso
No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back. — Turkish proverb
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. — Peter Drucker
Resistance to innovation is driven, not by ignorant masses, but by professionals with vested interest in tradition. — Arthur Koestler
You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into. — Mark Twain
Doing despite hardship
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. — Seneca
A diamond is just a piece of coal that did well under pressure.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. — Henry Ford
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. — Michelangelo
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. — Vaclav Havel
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. — Admiral Jim Stockdale (Vietnam POW )
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. — Oscar Wilde
Consult not your fears, but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed at, but with what is still possible for you to do. — Pope John XXIII, 1958-1963
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. — Winston Churchill
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. — Wayne Gretzky
Today’s tough times are tomorrow’s good old days.
Tough times don’t last, tough people do.
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. — Henry Ford
Optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. — Winston Churchill
Sense of urgency and patience
To achieve success: start before you feel ready.
Success requires both urgency and patience. Be urgent about making the effort, and patient about seeing the results.
A good solution applied with vigor is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes late. — General George S. Patton
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. — Abraham Lincoln
In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. — Mike Davidson
By the time you’ve arrived at the *perfect* solution, usually the problem has already changed. — Jessie Shefrin
No thing great is created suddenly. — Epictetus
Only bad things happen quickly. — Gordon Livingston
Done is better than perfect. — Mark Zuckerberg
Adaptation and learning from failure
Failure is success if we learn from it. — Malcom S. Forbes
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. — Colin Powell
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. — Bill Gates
Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. — Dale Carnegie
It is not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one more responsive to change. — Charles Darwin
You can never fail in anything you try to do. You can only produce certain results. — Wayne Dyer
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. — Dwight Eisenhower
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. — Bill Gates
Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. — Mark Twain
Try a lot of stuff and keep what works. — Jim Collins
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. — Winston Churchill
When you lose, don’t lose the lesson. — Dalai Lama
Future and disruption
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. — Mahatma Gandhi
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. — Victor Hugo
In general people exaggerate the short-run impact of technological change and underestimate the long-run impact. — Arthur C. Clarke
I never predict, I just look out the window and see what’s visible — but not yet seen. — Peter Drucker
The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. — William Gibson
Skate to where the puck is going to be. — Wayne Gretzky
Excellence and focus
Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change. — Tom Peters
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. — Steve Jobs
The secret of success is to do common things uncommonly well. — John Davidson Rockefeller, Sr
Learn to say no to the good so you can say yes to the best. — John C. Maxwell
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. — Jim Barksdale (originally Steven Covey?)
If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
Innovation, design and simplicity
Innovation is a change that creates a new dimension of performance. — Peter Drucker
Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure. — Joi Ito
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein
Perfection in design is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. — Attributed variously to both Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
All good ideas must die so that great ideas might live.
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. — Linus Pauling
Startup life
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled. — Howard Stevenson
As a startup CEO I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried. – Ben Horowitz
A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. – Steve Blank
Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. — Demosthenes
