The Best Book on Leadership - Part Two

p126 – You don't resolve the conflict, but you do make it irrelevant.

p126 – You use dissent and disagreement to resolve conflict.

p128 – Don't try to convert everybody right away … The innovators didn't even try to convert the non-believers.

p128 – Someone has to be accountable for results.

p129 – Every decision is a commitment of present resources to the uncertainties of the future. This, according to elementary probability mathematics, means that decisions will turn out to be wrong more often than right. At the least they will have to be adjusted.

p133 – All the great teachers I've seen made no distinction between children and adults.

p134 – The school has to be focused on performance and results rather than on rules and regulations and, therefore, needs a clear definition of its mission.

p137 – Those who are pursuing the long-term rather than the short-term objective find that the short-term objectives falls into place.

p138 – Define performance and hold yourself accountable for it … Performance is the ultimate test of any institution.

p141 – What do you want to be remembered for as an organization?

p141 – It's perfectly okay to abandon your mission (For example, once you've achieved the objective.)

p142 – An important goal is getting people to perform so that they grow on their own terms.

p142 – Need alone does not justify our moving in. We must match our strength, our mission, our concentration, our value.

p142 – The ultimate question is, “What should I hold myself accountable for by way of contribution and results?”

p145 – The yield from the human resource really determines the organization's performance.

p145 – It's not about being a good judge of people, that usually backfires. You want to go through a systematic, diagnostic process. Meaning, you need to define the mission/task and then match the candidates' strengths to the task.

p147 – Any organization develops people; it has no choice. It either helps them grow or it stunts them. It either forms them or it deforms them.

p147 – One can expect adults to develop manners and behavior and to learn skills and knowledge. But one has to use people's personalities the way they are, not the way we would like them to be.

p148 – Look always at performance, not at promise.

p149 – His teacher told him, “Look Peter, you'll never play Mozart the way the great pianists play, but there is no reason why you can't do your scales as well as they do.” He also mentions how Albert Einstein had fun practicing the fiddle four hours a day. But it just wasn't one of his strengths.

p150 – Keep the flame alive … Focus on success.

p151 – Make sure that volunteers are given responsibility … Use them as teachers.

p152 – You want performers to put on the pressure (by their example)

p152 – Teams do not develop themselves, they require systematic hard work … You don't start out with people, you start out with the job.

p158 – Membership on this board is not power, it is responsibility.

p159 – The true test of a relationship is not that it can solve problems but that it can function despite problems.

p164 – I believe firmly that people will tend to live up to the expectations that others have for them.

p166 – You can't really inspire and motivate people (the non performers.) We have learned that one inspires the leaders (Don't forget that Jesus only picked twelve Apostles.) The gap between the leaders and the average is a constant.

p168 – What one person does, another human being can always do again.

p169 – See your job as helping people achieve.

p169 – There is no greater achievement than to help a few people get the right things done.

p172 – The mission needs to be welcoming of change.

p173 – The functions of a board member: governor, sponsor, ambassador, and consultant.

p175 – We share the bad news first … It is the old principle of no surprises for the boss.

p178 – The process is essential to the quality of the product.

p179 – Good boards don't descend from Heaven. It takes a lot of very hard work.

p181 – What's the point of working in a non-profit institution if one doesn't make a clear contribution?

p182 – People require clear assignments.

p183 – Emphasis in managing people should always be on performance.

p184 – You ask your coworkers, “What am I doing that helps you with your work? What am I doing that hampers you?” Act on what they tell you.

p189 – The first priority for the non-profit executive's own development is to strive for excellence.

p190 – The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.

p191 – Creating a record of performance is the only thing that will encourage people to trust you and support you.

p191 – Periodically (once or twice a year) reviewing your performance is a huge key to self-development.

p192 – The important thing is not that you have rank, but that you have responsibility.

p193 – By focusing on accountability, people take a bigger view of themselves. That's not vanity, not pride, but it is self-respect and self-confidence. It's something that, once gained, can't be taken away from a person.

p193 – Leadership is not characterized by stars on your shoulder; an executive leads by example. And the greatest example is precisely the dedication to the mission of the organization as a means of making yourself bigger – respecting yourself more.

p195 – What do you want to be remembered for? Is the name of the entire chapter. p201 If you still can't answer it by the time you're fifty, you will have wasted your life. p202 It's a question that induces you to renew yourself. p222 The answer changes as we mature – as it should.

p196 – When you stop learning in a job, you begin to shrink.

p197 – Burnout, much of the time, is a cop-out for being bored.

p197 – Most work is doing the same thing again and again. The excitement is not the job – it is the result. Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the hills. If you allow a job to bore you, you have stopped working for results.

p197 – Write down what you expect to happen.

p198 – Effectiveness is more a matter of habits of behavior, and a few elementary rules. But the human race is not too good at it yet because organizations are pretty recent inventions.

p198 – Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

p198 – Your job is to make effective what you have – not what you don't have.

p199 – Are you a listener or a reader? … Being wonderful with people means listening well, not talking well.

p200 – You're the one who creates the excitement and the challenges.

p200 – The most effective road to self-renewal is to look for the unexpected success and run with it.

p201 – The three most common forcing tools for sustaining the process of self-renewal are teaching, going outside the organization, and serving down in the ranks.

p201 – All the individuals who have the greatest ability for self-renewal focus their efforts.

p204 – As a score-keeping mechanism money was important to me (Bob Buford) and easy to see. But it's just a game.

p204 – You want to be very clear about the vision so people can function successfully.

p206 – Self-knowledge is as important as task knowledge.

p206 – Give people a great deal of responsibility and a great deal of freedom to fail.

p207 – All worlds are small worlds.

p208 – Stay in touch with your constituency, or you run the risk that they will change and you won't.

p208 – The best hospital administrators I know have themselves admitted once a year as a patient.

p208 – You need to know your own biological clock (the “seasonal changes”)

p211 – Play as a team member.

p214 – I think people skills are very much based upon communicating a common goal.

p214 – When one really believes in something, it's very hard not to be aggressive.

p215 – If you don't know the mission, you shouldn’t be around.

p215 – One is, of course, self-driven, not always just by the mission but by a need to accomplish … The temptation to lie on the beach disappears fast and I am glad I have a tough job. (these words were not Druckers', it was a case study)

p216 – I never feel that I've done enough or that I've achieved enough.

p217 – I think the best self-development is developing others.

p217 – My role is to facilitate their brainstorming and thinking … My job is to establish the goal and the vision.

p218 – The way to overcome burnout is to work much harder. You do this by switching it up, by switching gears.

p218 – The proudest boast any executive can make, to have built the team that will perpetuate my work, my vision, my institution. That, in my experience, really distinguished the true achiever.

p222 – You are responsible for allocating your life.

p222 – Developing yourself begins by serving, by striving toward an idea outside yourself – not by leading.

p223 – One can only overcome weakness by developing strength. You don't have to be a perfectionist but you certainly should refuse to accept your own shoddy work.

p223 – Achievement comes from matching need and opportunity on the outside with competence and strength on the inside.

p223 – Change when you are successful – not when you're in trouble.

p224 – The teacher usually learns far more than the student.

p224 – Probably the best of the nuts and bolts of self-development is the practice of keeping score on yourself.

p224 – What will you do tomorrow as a result of reading this book? And what will you stop doing?