Warren Bennis Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

Warren Bennis
Manage the dream: Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.

Warren Bennis
Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.

Warren Bennis
This duality, making yourself better while teaching and developing others' judgment capabilities, is the key to leadership that is both productive and principled.

Warren Bennis
The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.

Warren Bennis
Great groups give the lie to the remarkably persistent but incorrect notion that successful organizations are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. However, each great group has a strong leader. In fact, great groups and great leaders create each other.

Warren Bennis
Every great group is an island... but an island with a bridge to the mainland.

Warren Bennis
The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person.

Warren Bennis
Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

Warren Bennis
Excellence is a better teacher than is mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Warren Bennis
The capacity to create a compelling vision and translate it into action and sustain it.

Warren Bennis
A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless … someone's got to make a wake up call.

Warren Bennis
Leadership is like beauty - it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.

Warren Bennis
The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause.

Warren Bennis
The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon.

Warren Bennis
Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.

Warren Bennis
To become a leader, then, you must become
yourself, become the maker of your own life

Warren Bennis
Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity

Warren Bennis
Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing. Both roles are crucial, and they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing the wrong things well.

Warren Bennis
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Warren Bennis
If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

Warren Bennis
The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

Warren Bennis
Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.

Warren Bennis
I'd always rather err on the side of openness. But there's a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call. The art of leadership is knowing how much information you're going to pass on - to keep people motivated and to be as honest, as upfront, as you can. But, boy, there really are limits to that.

Warren Bennis
The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

Warren Bennis