Patton on Leadership by Alan Axelrod

• Successful leaders do what unsuccessful leaders simply won’t do. And in so doing, they frequently achieve the impossible.
• War is tough. Leaders have to be tough.
• Sometimes a good leader has to be larger than life.
• Patton could reduce complex tasks to their essence, then focus all of his resources on that essence. He believed in attention to detail. Put all the pieces in place, i've your people ever opportunity to succeed, and they will do so.
• Give people goals they can understand, they will meet them. Set The bar high and your people will raise themselves to meet it.
• If Patton’s leadership style might be reduced to a single formula, it would be this: Blend a commanding presence with a common touch.
• The mark of a great motivational speaker is the ability to present ideas as if they come not from him or her, but form those who listen to him or her.
• When in doubt attack.
• The first rule of commanding is to act as if you are in charge--because you are.
• The effective leaders performs the miracle of a great actor: He sets himself apart from those he commands even as he identifies with those he commands.
• Qualities of a great general:
• Tactically aggressive (loves a fight)
• Strength of character
• Steadiness of purpose
• Acceptance of responsibility
• Energy
• Good health
• In a small minority of situations, an aggressive attitude is necessary in dealing with people. Most of the time, however, “tactical aggressiveness” is an attitude toward working a problem. It describes a leadership approach that actively engages reality rather then passively waiting for favorable circumstances to shape themselves.
• In business, the aggressive leader creates favorable circumstances.
• Patton sums up the chief qualities of leadership:
• Perfection of detail
• Personal supervision
• Thorough and detailed knowledge of the business at hand
• A strong physical leadership presence
• The ability to set a personal example
• The ability to communicate--explain--orders
• The commitment to ensure that orders are correctly executed
• Errors are either filares to act or actions that provide advantage to your competition. The vaccines against error understood this wya is not caution, but daring.
• A leader is a man who can adapt principles to circumstances.
• In confronting reality, the object is not to forget or abandon principles, but to allow them to be transformed by the demands of the moment.
• Don’t confuse leadership with a popularity contest. Focus on the mission and on getting your people to focus on the mission.
• A leader leads from the front, not from behind. She takes the risks she asks others to take. She sets the example for others to follow.
• Leadership is about maintaining a delicate balance between pushing and guiding. The genuine leaders leads. He mentors. He guides. He sets examples. He mediates, and he adjudicates. He makes decisions. But, whatever else he does, he does not merely command.
• An effective manager not only knows how to delegate tasks, but knows how to delegate leadership as well.
• The primary criterion a leader should meet is the ability to get the job done, whatever it may be.
• Observer candidates for promotion in action. Evaluate the results. Focus on the individuals who habitually cut to the chase and are able to marshal people and resources to get the job done.
• Bosses come and go. Build your career on a permanent record of accomplishment.
• Most leaders become leaders because they are uncommon--and they know it. The debate as to whether leaders are born or made is bogus. The truth is that some leaders are made, but most leaders make themselves.
• If you are a senior manager, you should not attempt to transform your prima donnas into “regular guys”. You’ve got all the “regular guys” that you need. Accept your subordinate managers as prima donnas, if that’s what they are, and make the most of it. Appeal to their self-confidence. Appeal to the qualities that convince them they are special. Encourage them to be even more exceptional as leaders, innovators, and doers.
• As a leader, you cannot always afford the luxury of revealing all of your feelings, particularly if they are negative.
• As a leader, it is part of your job to appreciate the toll the difficult times may take on the people you manage. In tough times, under adverse business conditions, your subordinates are likely to assume that you are not suffering and will not suffer as much as they.
• Effective managers must conduct themselves so that it is clear that they and their subordinates have an equal stake in the fate of the organization. You don't’ want to appear more comfortable than those who work for you. If employees suspect that they will be sacrificed to you, loyalty, as well as productivity, will disintegrate almost instantly when the chips are down.
• Act like a leader and speak like a leader.
• You can be wrong, but never be in doubt when you speak. Any doubt or fear in your voice and the troops can feel it.
• Never give a command in a sitting position unless you are on a horse or on top of a tank.
• The next time you have something really important to say to a client, coworker, subordinate, or boss, even by telephone, say it standing up.
• Don’t mistake the show of leadership, no matter how necessary, for leadership itself.
• Know when to fight for resources and to hold onto the personnel and other resources you need. Corporate politics can be a bloody business indeed.
• A leader must be intelligent and possesses of sound judgement driven by common sense. However, a leader must be willing to take risks that “smarter” folk might well avoid. A leader cannot be afraid to buck the odds, when need be.
• Most of all, a leader needs to be “stupid” enough not to give in to his or her fears.
• Do more than is required of you.
• Advancement comes with habitually doing more than you are asked.
• A genuine career requires a focused commitment of life energy.
• Go forward.
• In its most profound management sense, Go Forward is a recognition that business, like all aspects of life, is dynamic, not static. To go forward is to make each move, each action, count. To go forward is to give up dwelling on the past.
• We will win because we will never lose! There can never be defeat if a man refuses to accept defeat. Wars are lost in the mind before they are lost on the ground. No nation was ever defeated until the people were willing to accept defeat.
• Success is an attitude.
• It is a winning attitude that motivates success, and it is a winning attitude that sustains success.
• Recognize the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is an overall, big-picture plan, which indicates a set of goals. Tactics are the means by which you intend to carry out your strategy. Tactics include objectives, which are steps toward goals.
• In any competitive enterprise, action is preferable to innaction.
• Attack the problem, attack the market, attack the competition, and you are proceeding positively. Fear will melt, and morale will rise.
• Sometimes a leader needs to shake his organization into taking a fresh look at mission and methods.
• Opportunities are easily lost while waiting for “perfect” conditions.
• An effective leader continually assesses risks versus rewards and is willing to gamble--when he is convinced that he has a sure thing.
• A large part of leadership is stubborn determination, a certain single-mindedness. If you want progress, you must rule out all the excuses that impede progress.
• All statements of mission and tactics should be simple--even in as complex an enterprise as war or business.
• Just bear in mind that, in any field, the menu of available strategies and tactics is usually rather limited and can be mastered reasonably well.
• A leader must be able to make the connection between the stock of available strategies and tactics and the best, most efficient means currently available for execution.
• It behooves any leader to know the history of his or her discipline and to read all the experts in the field, particularly experts whose knowledge is based on actual experience. The object is not to follow any example or method slavishly, but to develop a strategic and tactical vocabulary that will create solutions faster and more efficiently than having to reinvent the wheel with each problem that is encountered.
• Inventory everything that can go wrong. Do not be blindly optimistic. Face reality, and plan for reality. The name of the game is contingency. But once the contingencies have been addressed and the plans formulated, push ahead without self-doubt or fear--or, more accurately, without taking counsel of your self-doubt and fear.
• Surround yourself with people whose knowledge and judgement you trust, then make good use of them. With considerable justification, many managers hesitate to make decisions by committee. In such situations, they believe, bucks get passed, and nothing creative ever gets done, or, at least, never gets done in time.
• Effective leadership is consultative. It welcomes and actively seeks multiple perspectives on any given problem. It does not squander, but rather leverages all available brainpower.
• Leadership requires marshalling resources cooperatively toward a goal with simultaneously preserving--and encouraging--independence of thought. THe moe minds at work independently on a situation, the better. Encourage the exercise of imagination. Insist on cooperation, but welcome creative dissent. Never close yourself to suggestions and insight from others, including from the most junior members of the team.
• Effective leadership is multidimensional. That is the nature of the world we live and work in. Formulating a single plan and sticking to it, no matter what, is one-dimensional thinking. To survive and succeed in the multidimensional world, you need more than one plan.
• Whatever you do, endeavor to leave yourself in the most favorable position--and put your competition in the least favorable.
• Go forward. Move quickly. But go forward and move quickly first with all the preparation necessary to ensure an efficient and profitable result, nut just a wasteful flurry of action for the appeasement of upper management.
• Flexible response it an important quality in any organization. Circumstances are rarely static for long. Failure to respond to change--or, more important, failure to anticipate change-is usually costly and often catastrophic.
• Don’t make changes for the sake of making changes. Spend some time studying the operation. Preserve as much of the useful status quo as possible. In the absence of pressing needs, phase in your innovations over time.
• Never confuse decisive decision making with hasty guesswork.
• Determine what you need to know, determine how to obtain what you need to know, and have a good reason for wanting the information in the first place. Then, and only then, will you truly know what you know and know what you do not know, so that you can base actions, plans, and decisions on a foundation of firm fact.
• It is up to the manager to motivate his pope, and the most important ingredient in motivation is knowledge of goals, objectives, purpose.
• Do not expect blind obedience. Teamwork is always more effective than  slave work.
• The first step toward building a team is defining objectives then making those objective clear to every member of the team. Moreover, communicate those objectives so persuasively that every member of the team will feel that he or she has the same stake in attaining the objectives.
• Managers: Beware of all assumptions, and totally avoid any assumption based on an “average”.
• Information is all around us, and it is the manager’s job to collect what is useful, analyze it, and make profitable use of it. Why rely on second hand opinion when your experience is so effective a teacher?
• Encourage your staff to take care of themselves, to avoid overwork. And take your own advice in this regard.
• The best information is that which you obtain firsthand. As Patton repeatedly advised, urged, and ordered, visit the front.
• Know the limits of what you can expect from yourself and your subordinates. Be willing to push to those limites, but understand that pushing beyond them is subject to one of the few absolute laws that govern business and other human endeavor: the law of diminishing returns. Pushing beyond their limits, people work efficiently, poorly, even counterproductive or destructively.
• Never hesitate to demand the maximum, but understand that it is futile and destructive to demand more.
• INtelligent, effective action is based on knowledge.
• Effective management requires motivating everyone to know his or her job inside and out, to know what can be done and what cannot. The object is to know as much as possible and then also to be fully aware of the things it is not possible to know.
• The truth will prevail, one way or another, and usually sooner rather than later. It is better to face it now and to convince others to do the same.
• WHether or not you face it, truth will create consequences.
• Management by remote control is doomed to fail.
• It is almost impossible for a manager to remain both aloof and effective. Come down off the mountain as frequently as possible.
• An on-site presence is always called for, the object being not only to see the situation for yourself, but to be seen by the people you lead.
• The more senior the officer, the more time he has. Therefore, the senior should go forward to visit the junior rather than call the junior back to see him.
• Resist the temptation to “pull rank” and summon subordinates away from their work just so that you can stay in your office.
• The essence of a leader’s mission is not to act in accordance with a job description, but to lead, guide, correct, and encourage the human beings he works with.
• Failure is a part of business. It will happen. The worst failures, however, are those we declare without having exhausted all possibilities and alternatives. Do not be in a hurry to write off any enterprise. When something falters, intervene personally.
• It takes courage and character to engage a fathering project. It takes courage and character to be a leader.
• A good manager questions the status quo, always looking for better, more efficient ways of doing the jobs that need to be done.
• The good manager asks questions about the tools and procedures routinely employed. He or she asks the poel closest to those tools and procedures. It is on the answers to these questions, given by these people, that he or she bases assessments, opinions, and recommendations concerning tools and procedures.
• When you see a serious problem, don’t just cast blame, tackle it--even if you believe that it is someone else’s responsibility.
• An effective manager concerns himself with whatever is needed to get the job done.
• Don’t equate attention to detail with micromanagement. Identify those details  on which the big picture depends, and then make certain that you manage those details.
• Whatever the high ground is for you, make it a top priority to seize and hold it. It is the difference between controlling a market or other situation and relinquishing control to competitors.
• Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the work of leadership is difficult only for you.
• Do as much of your business as possible in the areas and markets in which you have the greatest expertise and the most intensive resources. Exploit your strengths and, to the extent that it is possible, avoid your weaknesses.
• In ware as in business, it is important to be reliable, but never simply redictable. INnovate. Look for new solutions, even if doing so involves some difficulty: “it is much better to go over difficult ground where you are not expected than it is over good ground where you are expected.”
• The effective manager immerses herself in her work and reads whatever literature is available in her field.
• Recognize opportunity, and seize it.
• Ultimately, our actions are of greater consequences than our words. In critical situations, telling people what they want to hear may provide the illusion of a solution and bring temporary relief. In the long run, however, this approach will not avert disaster.
• Say what needs to be said, then act accordingly. Temporary discomfort is better than temporary relief--if it adverts permanent catastrophe.
• You cannot resist change--successfully. Part of a manager's job is to manage change., to lead his or her organization through it productively. This often involves addressing the fears of members of your organization.
• Planning is a vital element of leadership, but so is the flexibility to adapt plans to changing circumstances. Do not abandon a plan in panic, but realize that rigid adherence to a plan that no longer fits circumstances brings disaster.
• Leadership calls for a delicate combination of preparation and spontaneity.
• When a decision has to be made, make it. There is no totally right time for anything.
• You cannot control everything. Nor can you wait for the roll of the dice to come out just right.
• Sometimes you just have to move with the numbers you have. Make this fundamental pact with reality, or reality will leave you in the dust.
• The bet is the enemy of the good. By this I mean that a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. War is a very simple thing, and the determining characteristics are self-confidence, speed, and audacity. None of these things can never be perfect, but they can be good.
• Perfection is too expensive. It costs too much time. If you wait for the perfect plan or for the ideal circumstances, opportunities will be lost. Perfection is static. War, life, and business are dynamic and, therefore, imperfect by definition, it is incompatible with perfection.
• Momentum is one of the most valuable resources a manager has. It takes a great deal of energy to overcome inertia--to get going--so, once your organization is on the move with a project, it is your job to keep things going.
• Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy.
• Never let strategic considerations sweep you away from immediate tactical reality. Plans are nothing if they cannot be executed successfully.
• The soldier is the army. No army is better than its soldiers.
• Man is the only war machine...Always remember that man is the only machine that can win the war...It’s nice to have good equipment,...but man is the key.
• Too many managers are enamored of buildings, machinery, and other equipment. THese things are important, but they are nothing without the people to use them. Always put people first. Invest the bulk of your time, attention, and other resources on building a strong team. That is your priority.
• A good manager goes where she has to adn does what she must. If it means helping out in the front lines--working with a customer, handling a sales call, whatever--dont assume that you are too important to do what’s necessary.
• The effective manager follows Patton’s lead here and trains his or her own replacement. An effective manager is a teacher, coach, and mentor. Don’t worry, you won’t put yourself out of a job--except in an upward direction. Train subordinates to take over, and you make it possible to move up to large responsibilities.
• The priorities of a good manager are simple: He or she recognizes that the organization's most valuable assets are its people.
• A trade-off of material resources for human resources is a winning proposition. Never shortsightedly sacrifice people to save a few short-run dollars.
• An effective manage uses all resources efficiently. He does not make people work harder for the sake of doing hard work. The necessary and available work is always hard enough as it is. The effective manager uses equipment to serve people. He never puts people in the position of serving the equipment.
• Never use a subordinate as a scapegoat. Never fail to deliver on a promise made to a subordinate. Never exploit those on whom you opened, and never give them even the inking of a feeling that they are being exploited, cheated, or in any other way treated shabbily.
• Contrary to what some managers believe, loyalty is not something simply received from subordinates, like a tax or a tribute. It is always a mutual transaction. You cannot expect loyalty without demonstrating loyalty.
• The effective manager builds discipline and pride in employees, so that they fell a part of the organization on its largest scale. He or she must, however, also foster the development of teams within the larger organization, teams capable of operating in coordination with large units as well as on their own.
• He believed that the best authority on how to get a job done was the person who had to do the job.
• Managers should never resist learning even fro junior subordinates. Be the same token, a good manager sia generous mentor. All worthwhile enterprise involves teaching and learning.
• Take advantage of experience, even if it means putting a “higher ranking” employee under the wing of a veteran subordinate for a time.
• The best guide is experience, not a rule book. Use what you know works.
• Exploit the identity and pride of your firm. Encourage your employees to identity with the organization.
• Value experience above all else. Acquire it actively for yourself. Seek it out in others. In planning a project, resort to the textbooks only after you have consulted with people who have actually done and lived through the tasks you are contemplating.
• A theoretical understanding of business situations is important, but you must also develop plans to cope with reality.
• Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
• Patton saw leadership as mostly training and motivation. The object of leadership is to create people who know their jobs and who can reliably supply the how to your what.
• A leader needs to have confidence in his subordinates and, equally important, be willing and able to demonstrate his or her confidence in them. Few people want to fail. Most people want to do a good job.
• Train and prepare the members of your organization, then get out of their way as much as possible.
• Too many managers devoe the bulk of their energy to “running the business”. It is far more effective to focus on finding people who can do the “running” while the manager continually evaluates results and makes personnel-assignment adjustments accordingly.
• Treat your subordinates with respect and with interest. Both are essential. Employ public praise, but private criticism. Do not criticize a subordinate manager in front of his or her subordinates.
• It takes a wise leader to manage people--and an even wiser one to manage “truth”.
• It is the natural tendency of most people in charge to overestimate the threat they are facing. To correct this tendency, you may want consciously to understate the threat.
• Patton’s guiding principle was to go forward, to advance relentless against the enemy, and never to relinquish momentum.
• “All human being”, Patton wrote, “have an innate resistance to obedience. Discipline removes this resistance, and, by constant repetition, makes obedience habitual and unconscious”
• There is only one kind of discipline. Perfect discipline.
• In the truly important aspects of your enterprise, do not hesitate to ask for a great deal from yourself and from those you supervise. You and the others will discover new levels of performance. But you have to demand it--and expect it.
• The truth is that most of us are afraid to admit the power of inspiration. We’re afraid to believe that, ultimately, our success doesn’t depend on having better computers or milling machines than our competitors, but on being motivated by greater inspiration than they are. The idea of careers and millions of dollars in capital and profits riding on emotions is scary. But it’s also a fact.
• Patton’s greatness as a military leader--and his effectiveness as a manager of people--was his courageous willingness to recognize that his career, his life, the lives of his men, the welfare of his nation, everything, ultimately depended on his ability to be inspired by and to inspire others.
• Never neglect technology, but never forget that victory depends on maintenance of the spirit as much as it does on the maintenance of machines.
• Effective leaders never neglect and always cultivate the human touch. Make contact with your subordinates. Communicate with them on a caring, comradely, good-natured level. Demonstrate not only your confidence and pride in them, but your affection as well.
• A true leader gets inside those he leads. He does not import commands from the outside, but inspires people to draw on their own deepest inner reserves. Effective leadership is inspiration. An effective leader is a catalytic who does not force change, but enables change in others.
• Keep your focus on people, not products, not sales, not whatever it is your organization produces. In order to do whatever it does and create whatever it creates, your organization must first motivate people and keep them motivated. That is your number-one job as a manger.
• A big part of managing is knowing when to get up out of your chair and go forward to the front lines.
• “A little extra push” is often the most important tool in a manager's leadership toolbox.
• A good leader is never hashful about instilling pride in the organization. Set the bar high--higher even than you think reality warrants--and the people in your organization will raise themselves to meet it. Persuade your subordinates, colleagues, and bosses that ‘we are the best”, and the best of those people will rise to meet your appraisal.
• Fear is mostly fear of the unknown. You can manage fear in yourself and in those you lead by doing as much as possible to eliminate the unknown.
• Difficult and demanding situations make us stronger and better at what we do. Embrace difficulty as an opportunity for growth.
• Don’t go out of your way to introduce negativity into the workplace.
• Without abandoning reality, usher in new employees with as much positive truth as possible.
• Take advantage of ceremonial occasions as a stage on which to exhibit yourself as a leader. If necessary, create appropriate occasions.
• Effective leaders identify and publicly credit exceptional achievement. This is crucial to reinforcing the level of productivity and quality you want. It celebrates achievement and lifts morale, and it provides incentive to further achievement. It is an indispensible management technique.
• No management tool is more powerful than sincere personal praise delivered publicly and in a timely manner.
• Prompt positive reinforcement in the form of commemoration and celebration is essential to the morale of any organization.
• A good leader is generous with praise, and, equally important, he or she makes the praise genuine. It is always a good idea to review and announce your organization’s accomplishments.
• Take every opportunity presented to convey convincing praise. The function of primase is to encourage continued superior performance while setting the bar a little bit higher. Always end messages of congratulations or praise it a look toward the future.
• The effective manage puts the focus on the people managed, not on him- or herself.
• The problem with most praise is that it is empty, ringing hollow with vague adjectives. The most effective, persuasive praise is a precise tally of accomplishments, names, dates, figures, and effects.
• For most of us, discipline is mostly a matter of negatives: the ability to avoid temptation, to avoid laziness, to put off doing what we really want to do.
• It is important for a leader to demonstrate pride in his organization and to persuade the members of that organization to share his pride.
• Leaders must lead by example and must constantly display the qualities and values held in esteem by the organization.
• Take decisive action with a maximum effort. Halfway measures tip your hand to the competition.
• Remember that your best customers and clients are those you currently have. It is cheaper to hold on to them than it is to acquire new ones.
• A manager must ensure that her subordinates know their jobs, know the essential procedures, and know how to use essential equipment. Don’t leave any of these basics to chance.
• Keep directives a short as is compatible with their being fully understood. Don’t waste words. This uses up time, and it creates confusions.
• Managers should relentlessly and repeatedly review procedures and requirements to weed out anything that is nonessential or smacks of “make-work.” Streamline wherever possible, always stopping short of compromising quality or systems of genuinely prudent checks and balances.
• Remember, wars are won by killing people. The more we kill, the quicke we’ll get out of this war. Wars are not won by defending land. Let the enemy have any land he wants as long as we can get him into a position where we can kill him.
• All successful leaders know, above all, what they are doing. They know what the goal or goals are. They focus all activity on achieving those goals and do not allow themselves--or the people they lead-to get distracted by byproducts and side effects.
• Choose your battles. Having chosen a battle, win it. But, first, choose. An aggressive spirit of leadership is valuable, but pointless aggression is worse than useless. It is destructive of resources, of people, and of morale.
• Resist the temptation to put a layer of assistants between yourself and those you're expected to lead. Establish direct, efficient two-way communication. An open-door police is the best policy. If you cultivate an air of remoteness and unavailability, people will stop talking to you, and you will cheat yourself of the single most valuable commodity in any enterprise: information.
• A leader can be most convincing not by telling people what to think, but by marshalling the appropriate facts and arguments to guide them into thinking for himself---but in the direction desired.
• Orders must be issues early enough to permit time to disseminate them.
• Make all of your major orders or directives in person, if possible. Especially in an age of electronic communication, person-to-person contact is extremely powerful.
• Most business organizations conduct a plethora of meetings, but too few use meetings to exchange truly useful information.
• Effective manages use meetings to coordinate the organization, not merely to trade ideas or to review the past.
• Shouting is not always the best way to get an urgent message across. Lower your voice, and people will strain to listen. They’ll hang on every word. Fall silent at a critical point, and they’ll wait in suspense for your next word.
• Develop a ready facility in public speaking, especially off the cuff. Clear, well-organized, vivid, personal communication is essential to good management. Practice. Reheat your “spontaneity” until it really does seem spontaneous.
• A leader must establish identification with those he leads. He must, quite literally, speak their language. However, a leader is also an actor and must consciously act the part of a leader.
• There is no reason to waste time encoding and decoding a message if you know that the enemy cannot make use of the information before you make use of the information. It does the enemy no good to learn of your attack after you have already attacked.
• You must continually weigh security needs against the information needs of others in your organization.
• As a manager, one of your most important jobs is to provide inspiration.
• To lead, you must understand your business at its most essential--and then be able to focus all of your resources on that essence.
• An effective leader does not bribe her subordinates, but she continually demonstrates that she cares about them and respects their wants as well as their needs. Going the extra mile to make certain that employees feel adequately rewarded--not just in terms of salary, but in the amenities that contribute to the quality of work life--will produce great dividends in the form of maximum productivity, innovation, commitment to the firm, and personal loyalty to yourself. To be sure, you cannot grant all requests, and you must not squander scare resources. But stinginess costs far more than it saves.
• Maximum productivity is not the same as working continuously or working to exhaustion. Maximum productivity is working economically. It is managing time and resources efficiently.
• You cannot afford to squander precious human resources on creating the mere appearance of nonstop productivity.
• Give credit where credit is due--and overdue.
• Effective leadership is efficient leadership. It pares operations down to the simplest level that is consistent with the complexity of the job at hand. That is, the methods for getting a job done should never be more complicated than necessary and certainly no more complicated than the job itself.
• If you want a streamlined, efficient organization, begin by conveying these values in your own words and actions. Maybe you need to start by doing nothing more profound than clearing your desk.
• Set up routine and repetitive operations so that they do not require continually reinventing the wheel. Make it possible for you and your staff to conserve physical and mental energy for the truly creative tasks.
• Recognize your strengths and play to them.
• The effective leaders is not content to make the most of what happens to come her way. She devises--invents, creates--situations tailored to her strengths and the strengths of the organization she leads. This is the essence of proactive management: creating circumstances rather than merely responding to them.
• People must understand that individual action is vital, but that teamwork also requires subordinating ego to collective goals.
• The great things a man does appear to be great only after they are done. When they’re al hand, they are normal decisions and are done without knowledge of their greatness.
• Only by stretching do we grow. If you push the limits, you define new limits. And then you should push those. We are capable of producing and achieving much more than we believed possible.
• Lack of orders is no excuse for inaction.
• By definition, a leader takes the initiative and acts whenever necessary. He or she does not wait to be told what to do. The exceptional leader cultivates this proactive approach in others by establishing flexible guidelines that can serve in the absence of direct, detailed instructions.
• The lesson to learn here is not to violate your organization's rules and procedures, but to beware of following abstract theory and received wisdom slavishly. Real situations require flexibility and spontaneity Rules, rules of thumb, and sage advice from on high are all well and good--use them as guides--but be prepared to act spontaneously in the interest of the immediate “mission”.
• When higher authority is clear and available, it is the manager's job to act in accordance with higher authority. But in situations where such authority is unavailable, it is the manager’s job to take command of a situation so thoroughly that he or she can make the best independent decision. The alternative is paralysis.
• When you make a mistake, give the people you work with--including those you supervise--a shot at divinity. Admit your error. Own up. Then propose a course to correct the mistake. Never use your authority to make mistakes. Admit them. Explain them. Apologize for them. Above all else, use them. Allow people to see how you accept responsibility and how you can learn from error.
• The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on. Discipline, pride, self-respect, self-confidence, and the love of glory are attributes which will make a man courageous even when he is afraid.
• Don’t deny your fears. Don’t try to run away from them. Carry on in spite of them.
• You cannot learn to avoid fear, but you can learn to recognize when you are in danger of acting in bind accordance with it. You can learn not to take counsel of fear.
• Creative risk taking is essential to success in any enterprise with stakes worth the winning. THoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution, which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
• Courage is largely habit and self-confidence.
• Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.
• Establish a high standard for fairness and decency and you will create a work environment of trust and support, which will empower everyone to take the intelligence risks necessary to advance any enterprise. No one sticks his neck out if he sense that it may be chopped from behind.
• No leader who rests on his or here laurels remains a leader.
• You cannot avoid failure all of the time, but you can refuse to be pinned down by it.
• True success is character, and character is measured by how high you bounce when you topple from that height and hit bottom.
• Few business people are comfortable with the idea of audacity, yet without it, little fo great merit can be accomplished. The stakes of audacity are doubtless high, because the price of failure is great. Yet the price of avoiding audacity is high as well: a long, drawn-out consignment to mediocrity.
• You cannot take your competition by surprise if you act exclusively on precedent and received wisdom. Look at the situation afresh and always consider the advantages of taking the road less traveled.
• A highly effective way to affirm your leadership is to preside over celebration and commemoration. Create special events from time to time, and always greet your subordinates and colleagues on major holidays.