Warren Bennis Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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
Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.

Warren Bennis
The ruling quality of leaders adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again.

Warren Bennis
Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

Warren Bennis
You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself.

Warren Bennis
People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

Warren Bennis
We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.

Warren Bennis
What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.

Warren Bennis
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.

Warren Bennis
What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.

Warren Bennis
We are at least halfway through the looking glass, on our way to utter chaos. When the very model of a modern manager becomes C.E.O., he does not become a leader, he becomes a boss, and it is the bosses who have gotten America into its current fix.

Warren Bennis