Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of others are never captured.
Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.
Complacency is almost always the product of success or perceived success
Leadership is about coping with change
In terms of getting people to experiment more and take more risk, there are at least three things that immediately come to my mind. Number one, of course, is role-modeling it yourself. Number two is when people take intelligent, smart risks and yet it doesn't work out, not shooting them. And number three, being honest with yourself. If the culture you have is radically different from an experiment and take-risk culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make—and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.
The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.
Leadership is about setting a direction. It's about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to jump into a better future.
Commercial organisations that operate responsibly have benefitted by increased revenues of 682% compared to 166% for those that don't
In a change effort, culture comes last, not first.
Analytical tools have their limitations in a turbulent world. These tools work best when parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy.
Most US corporations today are over-managed and under-led. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership.
Never underestimate the power of the mind to disempower.
A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time.
We are always creating new tools and techniques to help people, but the fundamental framework is remarkably resilient, which means it must have something to do with the nature of organizations or human nature.
Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us. . . Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.
Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings.
Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.
Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.
We know that leadership is very much related to change. As the pace of change accelerates, there is naturally a greater need for effective leadership.
We see, we feel, we change.