Warren Bennis Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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