Although leadership and the exercise of power are distinguishable activities, they overlap and interweave in important ways. Consi...der a corporate chief executive officer who has the gift for inspiring and motivating people, who has vision, who lifts the spirits of employees with a resulting rise in productivity and quality of product, and a drop in turnover and absenteeism. That is leadership. But evidence emerges that the company is falling behind in the technology race. One day with the stroke of a pen the CEO increases the funds available to the research division. That is the exercise of power. The stroke of a pen could have been made by an executive with none of the qualities one associates with leadership.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clea...n cannot be had.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety... of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadership... in industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for that... that stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of leadership ... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that no...thing will split up that attention.... The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have already eaten breakfast to the accompaniment, in our morning newspapers, of too many "Yankee Go Home" signs, too many riot...s, too many denunciations of ourselves, to believe that leadership, even in the cause of peace, can reward us with international laurel wreaths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Looked upon with historical objectivity, the Catholic Church as a religion has far better prospects. Consider its unified, world-w...ide papal leadership, the methods of Catholic ecclesiastic thought, and the life-pervading sanctification of existence, both in everyday life and at great moments; add the present glory of a thousand years of art, the multitude of religious activities, the impressive power of priests and religious, spiritually rooted celibates whose existence the faith consumes; top it off with Catholic piety, based on the Church but far from its violence and political cunning, and even spreading a touch of philosophy among the populace--compared with all this, Protestantism seems poor. Yet Protestantism, whatever may be held against it, has one virtue that outweighs all flaws. It is the principle of its birth: the chance of breaking through every religious phenomenon to a new original realization. In Catholic eyes, Protestantism is purely negative. It gives up tenet after tenet, ending in what must seem to a Catholic the total disappearance of all religious essentials--the God-man, the Resurrection, the personal God, the sacraments--and it pulverizes itself by endless internal schisms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This I do know and can say to you: Our country is in more danger now than at any time since the Declaration of Independence. We do...n't dare follow the Lindberghs, Wheelers and Nyes, casting suspicion, sowing discord around the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We don't want revolution among ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »