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Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

People are more easily led than driven.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

The problem facing almost all leaders in the future will be how to develop their organizations' social architecture so that it actually generates intellectual capital.

Leadership is about taking an organization to a place it would not have otherwise gone without you, in a value-adding, measurable way.

Nothing more enhances authority than silence.

Show me a great company and I'll show you one that has radically changed itself and is looking forward to the opportunity of doing so again.

Tell what you have done, not what you think of yourself.

There is no limit to what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.

Leadership... is about coping with change.

Moral leadership is not mere preaching, or the uttering of pieties, or the insistence on social conformity. Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers.

Let us look further at the essentials of leadership. Of the greatest importance is the ability to grasp a total situation… Out of a welter of facts, experience, desires, aims, the leader must find the unifying thread. He must see the whole, not a mere kaleidoscope of pieces. He must see the relation between all the different factors in a situation.

You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that's assault, not leadership.

You can only lead others where you yourself are prepared to go.

In the conventional mode, people want to know whether the followers believe in the leader; a more searching question is whether the leader believes in the followers.

You must not retain for one instant any man in a responsible position where you have become doubtful of his ability to do his job. This matter call for more courage than any other thing you will have to do, but I expect you to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you will help them to become what they are capable of being.

Generals are expendable just as is any other item in an army.

...(T)he genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders see and act on their own and their follower's values and motivations.

I'm a great believer that leadership, in a large part, is moral leadership. And people want to follow moral leadership. They respect it. And they expect it, too.

The world is made up of three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened!

The first lesson I learned as a plebe came from an upperclassman yelling in my face. He told me that there were four acceptable answers: 'Yes, sir'; 'No, sir'; 'No excuse, sir'; and 'Sir, I do not understand.'

When people walk in the door, they want to know: What do you expect out of me? What's in this deal for me? What do I have to do to get ahead? Where do I go in this organization to get justice if I'm not treated appropriately? They want to know how they're doing. They want some feedback. And they want to know that what they are doing is important.

If you take the basic principles of leadership and answer those questions over and over again, you can be successful dealing with people.

The first job of a leader is to define reality.

Leadership is an army you have to enlist in. You can't get drafted into leadership. You can get drafted into management.

A general must see alone and know alone, meaning that he must see what others do not see and know what others do not know. Seeing what others do not see is called brilliance, knowing what others do not know is called genius. Brilliant geniuses win first, meaning that they defend in such a way as to be unassailable and attack in such a way as to be irresistible.

When governance has the texture of service it calls for a like response from those governed.