Effective leaders only negotiate with those who are willing to negotiate.
Great leaders are patient — and they never cave quickly. Many never cave, period.
Sometimes, bullies need to be taught a lesson. When you’re trying to lead — but others shout you down — the time for softball is over. In situations of coercion, your power as a leader is never more necessary.
Speak softly, but carry a big stick — you know the score.
One of Obama’s greatest failures as a leader is the homogeneity in perspectives and attitudes of those closest to him.
Bark without biting. – A leader who can’t enforce his power has no power at all.
Great leaders ignite burning platforms — and never let them sputter.
Every great leader humanizes his opponents, because every opponent is a human with a human agenda.
Strike Faustian bargains. Every great leader has to cut a deal with the devil, right? Wrong. Just ask Gandhi, Ataturk, MLK, or the Founding Fathers. All forged coalitions, and crafted compromises — but none made deals that poisoned the very institutions they fought so hard to craft.
Leaders aren’t salesmen because leaders aren’t sellers: they’re buyers. They buy into shared interests instead of selling out to conflicting interests.
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Business life is a marathon, not a sprint. Most of us don’t go to work for 20 minutes a day, run as fast as we can, and then rest until the next race. We go to work early in the morning, run as fast as we can for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, then come home and run hard again with personal obligations and sometimes more work, before getting some sleep and doing it all over again.
That’s why I’m such a fanatic about doing work you love. But even if you love it, that kind of schedule is deeply draining. Not an athlete in the world could sustain that schedule without rest. Most athletes have off-seasons.
So if we’re running a daily marathon, it might help to learn something from people who train for marathons.
Like my friend Amanda, who recently told me she was training to run the New York City Marathon. “I’m just going to follow the plan,” she said and later emailed it to me. Here’s what I learned: if you want to run a marathon successfully without getting injured, spend four days a week doing short runs, one day a week running long and hard, and two days a week not running at all.
But how many of us work nonstop, day after day, without a break? It might feel like we’re making progress, but that schedule will lead to injury for sure.
There’s a method of long distance running that’s becoming popular called the Run-Walk method; every few minutes of running is followed by a minute of walking. What’s interesting is that people aren’t just using this method to train, they’re using it to race. And what’s even more interesting is that they’re beating their old run-the-entire-distance times.
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Kanter’s Law : Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work.
A successful brand manager for a major consumer goods company has a poster on his wall declaring “New products always take longer and cost more.” (Amen, brother.) There are always unexpected obstacles and hidden delays. Leaders must be prepared to secure additional resources, beg for additional time, or figure out creative ways to stretch scarce resources.
Harsh reality sets in: This is harder to do than anyone thought.
