Leadership Quotes

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

I will lead my people by the hand along the road until their feet are sure and they know the way. Then they may choose for themselves and rule themselves. Then my work will be done.

I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.

The question I ask myself like almost every day is: 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?' Unless I feel like I'm working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I'm not going to feel good about how I'm spending my time. And that's what this company is.

In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it and the board tried to fire me and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that at the time.

Learn from the masses, and then teach them.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy tobe motivated.

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

Focus on the big decisions. "As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?" he asks. "You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.

We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages.

I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected.

If I have three good decisions a day, that's enough.

May it be my privilege to have the happiness of establishing the commonwealth on a firm and secure basis and thus enjoy the reward which I desire, but only if I may be called the author of the best possible government; and bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for its future government, will stand firm and stable.

You can't run a government from one single person. What instead matters is that leadership be about gathering around extraordinary individuals and getting the best out of them.

I want to lead Canada. All of Canada, not just parts of Canada. ... I am not going to write off certain parts of the country just because we had a tough past 10 years. Or, tough past 100 years.

If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.