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1 " When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. "
― Harvard Business Review , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership
2 " By contrast, those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement. "
3 " A leader has to have the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain. He has to be able to raise tough questions without getting too anxious himself. "
4 " leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies. "
5 " In South Africa in the early 1990s, a joke was making the rounds: Given the country’s daunting challenges, people had two options, one practical and the other miraculous. The practical option was for everyone to pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and fix things. The miraculous option was for people to talk with one another until they could find a way forward. "
6 " But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results. "
7 " Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neurotransmitters of the brain’s limbic system, which governs feelings, impulses, and drives. Research indicates that the limbic system learns best through motivation, extended practice, and feedback. Compare this with the kind of learning that goes on in the neocortex, which governs analytical and technical ability. The neocortex grasps concepts and logic. "
8 " Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time. "
9 " Corporations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. "
10 " Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else. "
11 " When told that future promotions will depend to some degree on their ability to nurture leaders, even people who say that leadership cannot be developed somehow find ways to do it. "
12 " Stockdale Paradox This finding is named after Admiral James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honor, who survived seven years in a Vietcong POW camp by hanging on to two contradictory beliefs: His life couldn’t be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Like Stockdale, people at the good-to-great companies in our research confronted the most brutal facts of their current reality, yet simultaneously maintained absolute faith that they would prevail in the end. And they held both disciplines—faith and facts—at the same time, all the time. "
13 " You get results by exploiting opportunities, not solving problems. "
14 " Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality—while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail. "
15 " When you look across the good-to-great transformations, they consistently display three forms of discipline: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. "
16 " Executives also owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs. It may not be the employees’ fault that they are underperforming, but even so, they have to be removed. "
17 " But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels. "
18 " But Welch also thought through another issue before deciding where to concentrate his efforts for the next five years. He asked himself which of the two or three tasks at the top of the list he himself was best suited to undertake. Then he concentrated on that task; the others he delegated. Effective executives try to focus on jobs they’ll do especially well. They know that enterprises perform if top management performs—and don’t if it doesn’t. "
19 " Articulate each meeting’s purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan’s legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM’s industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century. "
20 " Executives trying to recognize high levels of achievement motivation in their people can look for one last piece of evidence: commitment to the organization. When people love their jobs for the work itself, they often feel committed to the organizations that make that work possible. Committed employees are likely to stay with an organization even when they are pursued by headhunters waving money. "
