Home > Work > The Executive Edge: An Insider's Guide to Outstanding Leadership
1 " In the twenty-first century, the most successful leaders will focus on sustaining superior performance by aligning people around mission and values, and empowering leaders at all levels, while concentrating on serving customers and collaborating throughout the organization. "
― Daniel Goleman , The Executive Edge: An Insider's Guide to Outstanding Leadership
2 " Leadership at its essence is about serving. But it’s not only people serving you. You’re serving them. We’re joined together to serve the customer. At Medtronic, we’re trying to serve the patient. We’re trying to restore people to full life and health. Everyone that I know wants to do that job well, and so we need to re-conceptualize how we in management serve the employees who are doing the work, who are closest to the customers, and make their jobs and their lives easy. We’re serving them; they’re not serving us. "
3 " The organizations that compete internally will not be successful in the future. "
4 " And one of the paradoxes is that leaders, the higher they go, the less vertical feedback they get on how they’re actually doing, because people are afraid to tell them. So leaders can go off in a direction thinking they’re doing fine, not realizing they’re not, "
5 " Good work involves the intertwining of three features: excellence, engagement, and ethics. Good work is technically excellent work—people know what they’re doing. It’s personally engaging and meaningful. They want to do it. They look forward to going to work. They don’t dread it. And it’s carried out in an ethical way. "
6 " A business leader who exemplified good work would be somebody who understood himself or herself, understood the corporation or company that they were in very well, knew something about their history, understood the domain—the sector in which they’re working, which could be anything from transportation to widgets—and had some sense of the mega-trends going on in the world. You cannot be an excellent leader unless you’ve thought about this kind of knowledge, so that’s excellence. "