Top 100 Warren Bennis Quotes
#1. Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as 'curious to the end.' David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity 'about every subject under the sun.'
Tom Peters
#2. Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions.
Warren G. Bennis
#3. 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 Bennis
#4. Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity
Warren G. Bennis
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
Warren Bennis
#8. Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.
Warren Bennis
#9. Successful leadership is not about being tough or soft, sensitive or assertive, but about a set of attributes. First and foremost is character
Warren G. Bennis
#10. Innovation- any new idea-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 G. Bennis
#11. Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.
Warren G. Bennis
#12. 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 G. Bennis
#13. Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing.
Warren Bennis
#14. Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.
Warren G. Bennis
#15. I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.
Warren G. Bennis
#16. A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.
Warren G. Bennis
#17. If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, "How clear is the metaphor?"
Warren G. Bennis
#19. Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.
Warren G. Bennis
#20. The leader ... is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas.
Warren G. Bennis
#21. Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.
Warren G. Bennis
#22. Leadership is the capacity to turn vision into reality.
Warren Bennis
#23. If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.
Warren G. Bennis
#24. What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.
Warren G. Bennis
#25. Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.
Warren G. Bennis
#26. Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept.
Warren G. Bennis
#27. Learning in a face-to-face human community, as humans have evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years, may always be the ideal - especially in an endeavor that is as relationship-driven as business.
Warren Bennis
#28. How can we educators claim credit for understanding, let alone teaching, the 'global mind' without a single course on the impact of religion on every day life?
Warren Bennis
#29. Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
Warren G. Bennis
#30. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren G. Bennis
#31. Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future ... I am certain that leadership can be learned and that terrific coaches ... facilitate learning.
Warren G. Bennis
#32. Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential.
Warren G. Bennis
#33. Trust is difficult to define, but we know when it's present and when it's not.
Warren G. Bennis
#34. 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
#35. In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.
Warren G. Bennis
#36. 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
#37. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
Warren Bennis
#38. Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.
Warren Bennis
#39. Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
#40. Growing other leaders from the ranks isn't just the duty of the leader, it's an obligation.
Warren G. Bennis
#41. 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 G. BENNIS,
Timothy Ferriss
#42. Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.
Warren G. Bennis
#43. If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.
Warren G. Bennis
#44. Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided.
Warren G. Bennis
#45. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
Warren Bennis
#46. 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
#47. Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.
Warren Bennis
#48. While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.
Warren G. Bennis
#50. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.
Warren Bennis
#51. The original and brilliant idea of an MBA was the opportunity for students to study the theory and application of business and management principles.
Warren Bennis
#52. People who know what they want and why they want it, and have the skills to communicate that to others in a way that gains support
Warren G. Bennis
#53. Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
Warren G. Bennis
#54. In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.
Warren G. Bennis
#55. The leader has a clear idea of what he wants to do professionally and personally,
and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures
Warren G. Bennis
#56. As my blog editor knows all too well, I wasn't all that keen to enter the blogosphere world.
Warren Bennis
#58. Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.
Warren G. Bennis
#59. The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
Warren G. Bennis
#60. It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
Warren G. Bennis
#61. Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them.
Warren Bennis
#62. Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
Warren Bennis
#64. Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
#65. The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person.
Warren G. Bennis
#66. The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes. The worst problem in leadership is basically early success.
Warren G. Bennis
#67. Learning options will indeed mushroom for business students and leaders, but it will take prudence and shrewdness to find and utilize the best option.
Warren Bennis
#68. Once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals ...
Warren G. Bennis
#69. Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.
Warren G. Bennis
#70. Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.
Warren Bennis
#71. Learning to be an effective leader is no different than learning to be an effective person. And that's the hard part
Warren G. Bennis
#72. Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Warren G. Bennis
#73. To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.
Warren G. Bennis
#74. One of the best teaching experiences Ed Schein and I had when we were teaching at MIT in the 1960s was inventing a course on leadership through film.
Warren Bennis
#75. Without a terrific leader, you're not going to have a Great Group. But it is also true that you're not going to have a great leader without a Great Group.
Warren G. Bennis
#76. I've become more and more aware of the promise and struggle to teach the global mind nowadays because I use every chance I get to ask faculty and administrators of management education programs why we don't offer at least one course - not even required, just an elective - on the world's religions.
Warren Bennis
#77. More leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.
Warren G. Bennis
#78. Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.
Warren Bennis
#79. The ideal boss for a growing leader is probably a good boss with major flaws, so that one can learn all the complex lessons of what to do and what not to do simultaneously.
Warren G. Bennis
#80. 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
#81. A great director or leader knows his people, creates a great team, and then makes a great movie that can influence millions more than the readers of his column.
Warren Bennis
#82. I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn't very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing.
Warren Bennis
#83. The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders
are made rather than born.
Warren G. Bennis
#84. The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.
Warren G. Bennis
#85. In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Warren G. Bennis
#86. Recognize the skills and traits you don't possess, and hire the people who have them.
Warren G. Bennis
#87. The primary goal of management education was, as originally conceived, to impart knowledge that could be applied to a variety of real-world business situations.
Warren Bennis
#88. Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.
Warren Bennis
#89. Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.
Warren Bennis
#90. 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
#91. Listening to the inner voice - trusting the inner voice - is one of the most important lessons of leadership.
Warren G. Bennis
#94. A passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purposes of work and human organisations
Warren G. Bennis
#95. People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.
Warren Bennis
#96. The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon.
Warren Bennis
#97. Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback.
Warren G. Bennis
#98. Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.
Warren G. Bennis
#99. Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren G. Bennis
#100. The new leader is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change.
Warren G. Bennis
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