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Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

Warren G. Bennis

Leaders are people who do the right thing: managers are people who do things right. Both roles are crucial, but they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing wrong things well.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Leaders People Roles
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
Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Errors Knowing Worry
The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Hospitality Leadership Vision
If great teams don’t have an “enemy,” they create one for themselves because, as former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta pointed out, “you can’t have a war without one.”
WARREN G. BENNIS

Create Enemy Team War
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
Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Herds Painting Vision
Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Dance Leadership Music
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
Embrace error: Create an atmosphere in which prudent risk taking is strongly encouraged.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Atmosphere Errors Risk
You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Needs People Vision
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.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Characteristics Important Leader Truth Willingness
In great groups, the right people always have the right job.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Groups Jobs People
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Hero Problem Reality
Find the appropriate balance of competing claims by various groups of stakeholders. All claims deserve consideration but some claims are more important than others.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Balance Groups Important
There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Differences Knowledge Learning

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

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Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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