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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

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Warren G. Bennis
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More quotes by Warren G. Bennis

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Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
Warren G. Bennis
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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
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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
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Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.
Warren G. Bennis
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I'd always rather err on the side of openness. But there's a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call. The art of leadership is knowing how much information you're going to pass on - to keep people motivated and to be as honest, as upfront, as you can. But, boy, there really are limits to that.
Warren G. Bennis
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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
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The failure to find the right niche for people - or to let them find their own perfect niches - is a major reason that so many workplaces are mediocre, even toxic, in spite of the presence of talent. Leaders of great groups give them whatever they need and free them from everything else.
Warren G. Bennis
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Understand the Pygmalion Effect: Leaders should always expect the very best of those around them. They know that people can change and grow.
Warren G. Bennis
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Trust is difficult to define, but we know when it's present and when it's not.
Warren G. Bennis
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Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.
Warren G. Bennis
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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
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Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Warren G. Bennis
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Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.
Warren G. Bennis
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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
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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 G. Bennis
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All claims deserve consideration but some claims are more important than others.
Warren G. Bennis
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Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
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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
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Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.
Warren G. Bennis
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Every great group is an island... but an island with a bridge to the mainland.
Warren G. Bennis