Warren Bennis > Quotes

“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 Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.”
― Warren G. Bennis

“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 Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
― Warren Bennis

“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 Bennis

“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, On Becoming a Leader

“It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.”
― Warren Bennis

“...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 Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.”
― Warren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.”
― Warren G. Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.”
― Warren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – and the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.”
― Warren G. Bennis, Geeks and Geezers

“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, On Becoming a Leader

“More leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.”
― Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept.”
― Warren Bennis

“A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, 'I guess you want my resignation?' Watson said, 'You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you!”
― Warren G. Bennis, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge

“Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.”
― Warren Bennis

“In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.”
― Warren Bennis

“Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing”
― Warren Bennis

“The first step in becoming a leader, then, is to recognize the context for what it is—a breaker, not a maker; a trap, not a launching pad; an end, not a beginning—and declare your independence.”
― Warren G. Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“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

“leadership that knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its workforce.”
― Warren G. Bennis, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge

“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, On Becoming a Leader

“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 Bennis

“First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that. Be what you are, and don’t lose it. . . . It’s very hard to be who we are, because it doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants.” But, of course, as Lear has demonstrated, it’s the only way to truly fly.”
― Warren G. Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“One thing Great Groups do need is protection. Great Groups do things that haven’t been done before. Most corporations and other traditional organizations say they want innovation, but they reflexively shun the untried. Most would rather repeat a past success than gamble on a new idea. Because Great Groups break new ground, they are more susceptible than others to being misunderstood, resented, even feared. Successful”
― Warren G. Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“In 1989, the Internet’s 400 early adopters were predicting that it would revolutionize how people communicate,”
― Warren G. Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“Former Lucky Stores CEO Don Ritchey said that difficult bosses really “test your beliefs, and you learn all the things you don’t want to do or stand for. I”
― Warren G. Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“Communities based on merit and passion are rare, and people who have been in them never forget them. And then there is the sheer exhilaration of performing greatly. Talent wants to exercise itself, needs to. People pay a price for their membership in Great Groups. Postpartum depression is often fierce, and the intensity of collaboration is a potent drug that may make everything else, including everything after, seem drab and ordinary. But no one who has participated in one of these adventures in creativity and community seems to have any real regrets. How much better to be with other worthy people, doing worthy things, than to labor alone (”
― Warren G. Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

“Being a first-class noticer allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.”
― Warren Bennis, Geeks and Geezers