Colin Powell Quotes

Great leaders don't rush to blame. They instinctively look for solutions.

Good leaders need a positive agenda, not just an agenda of dealing with crisis.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

Every manager must be prepared to face every situation.

When you are in a situation or a crisis, you need to define, what is the unique role that I can play?

Where there is no uncertainty, there is no longer the need for leadership. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for leadership. Your capacity as a leader will be determined by how well you learn to deal with uncertainty.

I'm not a professional politician. I'm a professional problem solver.

You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. Other people can cope with the waves, it's his job to watch the tide.

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.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice.

Effective management always means asking the right question.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

Leaders of the future will have to be visionary and be able to bring people in - real communicators. These are things that women bring to leadership and executive positions, and it's going to be incredibly valuable and incredibly in demand.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Problem-solving becomes a very important part of our makeup as we grow into maturity or move up the corporate ladder.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.'

An executive is a person who always decides sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.

I know how to make decisions, and I know how to lead.

It’s not the man; it’s the plan.

Good political leadership for me involves getting the big decisions right - however difficult, however controversial, however potentially divisive and then being able to take people with you.

When the President is a moralist, he needs a process that will make up for the natural shortcomings of such a style—an inattention to second-step thinking, an allergy to detail, a tendency not to see the point of having dissenters, a habit of allowing certainty to override considerations of risk. It is the National Security Advisor’s responsibility to fill a President’s strategic gaps, not to exacerbate them.