Top 71 Warren G Bennis Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity
Warren G. Bennis
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.
Warren G. Bennis
#8. 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
#9. Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.
Warren G. Bennis
#10. I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.
Warren G. Bennis
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.
Warren G. Bennis
#17. 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
#18. What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.
Warren G. Bennis
#19. In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.
Warren G. Bennis
#20. Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.
Warren G. Bennis
#21. A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless ... someone's got to make a wake up call.
Warren G. Bennis
#22. Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
Warren G. Bennis
#23. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren G. Bennis
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Trust is difficult to define, but we know when it's present and when it's not.
Warren G. Bennis
#27. 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
#28. Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept.
Warren G. Bennis
#29. 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
#30. Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided.
Warren G. Bennis
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
#38. 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
#39. In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.
Warren G. Bennis
#40. 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
#42. Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.
Warren G. Bennis
#43. The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
Warren G. Bennis
#44. It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
Warren G. Bennis
#46. The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person.
Warren G. Bennis
#47. 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
#48. The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes. The worst problem in leadership is basically early success.
Warren G. Bennis
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Warren G. Bennis
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Listening to the inner voice - trusting the inner voice - is one of the most important lessons of leadership.
Warren G. Bennis
#56. Growing other leaders from the ranks isn't just the duty of the leader, it's an obligation.
Warren G. Bennis
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.
Warren G. Bennis
#61. 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
#62. Recognize the skills and traits you don't possess, and hire the people who have them.
Warren G. Bennis
#63. 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
#64. Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.
Warren G. Bennis
#67. 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
#68. Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback.
Warren G. Bennis
#69. Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.
Warren G. Bennis
#70. Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren G. Bennis
#71. 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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