Alexis Herman Quotes

You can't lead without taking risk.

Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process.

The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.

A manager has to have all different sides covered.

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

Leaders have to figure it out when there is no road map.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

A C.E.O.'s job is leadership, problem solving, and team building. I've done that my whole career.

Leadership is working with goals and vision; management is working with objectives.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.

In life you need to take a risk.

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

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

Offer someone the opportunity to rebuild a company or reinvent an industry as the primary incentive, and it will attract those drawn to the challenge first and the money second.

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.