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Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.

Warren G. Bennis

Leadership is like beauty – it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Define Hard Knows Leadership
Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Followers Leadership Telling Truth
To become a leader, then, you must become yourself, become the maker of your own life
WARREN G. BENNIS

Leader Leadership Makers
If you’re the leader, you’ve got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies – that you know and must do everything. Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Ego Give Up Leader
One of the worst mistakes is to do nothing.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Mistake More Nothing Worst
Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Demand Development Moving
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 G. BENNIS

Inspirational Motivational Success
Great leaders love talent and know where to find it. They surround themselves with talented people who can work effectively together.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Leader People Together
Listening to the inner voice – trusting the inner voice – is one of the most important lessons of leadership.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Important Listening Voice
Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Honesty Leadership Simple
This duality, making yourself better while teaching and developing others’ judgment capabilities, is the key to leadership that is both productive and principled.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Judgment Keys Principle Teaching
Create strategic alliances and partnerships: Now and in years to come, shrewd leaders will create allegiances with other organizations whose fates are correlated with their own.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Allegiances Fate Organization Years
In great groups, the right people always have the right job.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Groups Jobs People
This is more than just having a vision. You can see the difference in the often-cited way in which Steve Jobs brought in John Sculley to take over Apple.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Jobs Opportunity Years
Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. Leadership is the wise use of this power: Transformative leadership.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Initiate Leadership Power Translation Wise
First and foremost, effective leaders must continuously strive to make themselves smarter and better at making judgments.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Firsts Judgment Leader
There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Differences Knowledge Learning
Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Advice Lasts Leader
The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Being Leader Leadership Manager
The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Boss Inspirational Leadership
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 G. BENNIS

Created Iron Moment Necessity Something
Effective leaders make a full commitment to be a learner, to keep increasing and nourishing their knowledge and wisdom.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Commitment Knowledge Leader Wisdom
Organizations should try to find out if their learning programs actually work.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Organization Program Trying
You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Knows Materials Raw Want
Almost without exception, members of great groups see themselves as winning underdogs, as a feisty David hurling fresh ideas at a big, backward-looking Goliath. They always have an “enemy.”
WARREN G. BENNIS

Backward Enemy Ideas Themselves Winning
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Hero Problem Reality
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Born Future Leaders Leadership

Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.

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Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.

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