Blog about Leadership

 Quotes:

“Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.”
Warren Bennis

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Peter Drucker

“Leaders manage change. Managers control process.”
Anonymous

“Managers think about today. Leaders think about tomorrow.”
Dan McCreary

Blog articles:

What is the Difference Between Leadership and Management

At my prior company, the CEO was known for many sayings, some stuck, some didn’t. One saying that resonated with me was that “Leadership happens at every level.” In a lot of modern companies, especially smaller and especially technology companies, this saying carries a lot of truth. Some cultures foster leadership, while others fail to develop leaders even at the highest positions of management. Many small, technology companies fit into the former. Perhaps it’s the culture where young, fresh out of college grads are recognized for contributing new innovative ideas, or perhaps it’s just the camaraderie of small companies in general. Either way, fostering leadership at every level of the organization produces a company of fully committed and fully contributing team members.

Seth Godin, the well known marketing author, wrote about how people sometimes have a lot of failures, but just one success builds a successful career (read here). There’s definitely more to understand about failure and success, but the message is the same – don’t fail to do anything by trying to avoid failure. Start trying to accomplish something and accept that there may be failures on the path to attaining success.

If you’re low on the totam pole today, start leading where you are. Don’t wait for the management position or until you’re a manager of managers to start leading. By then, you won’t have the experience learned from leading where you are now. On the flip side, dealing with people and learning how to contribute and influence will provide you with invaluable experience for when your job requires you to lead. Don’t worry about failing for failure is an experience on the path of learning how to succeed.

If you are in a leadership position, foster leadership at every level of your organization.

Knowledge@Wharton

If you visit Knowledge@Wharton’s website (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, you may note the categories of articles listed on the left-hand side of the page. While there is great information in every category and one could spend hours reading and learning, I have always been struck by the category – Leadership and Change – and how it associates change with leadership.

Leadership and Change

Perhaps I could expound more on change and I have already written several articles about leadership and change, but for this post, I just want to share with you a viewpoint of change from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor in AD 161-180, in his phenomenal work, Meditations:

“Is any man afraid of change? Why, what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And cast thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thy self also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?”

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