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50 Quotes to Inspire Successful Leadership
Most people believe that the key to successful leadership is influence, not authority. Do you agree? The answer to that question, it seems, lies in whether the goal is to get others to work from a place of compliance or from a place of commitment which underlines the difference between influential leadership and authoritative leadership.
Working within an influential leadership model, committed employees will give up discretionary time to solve problems, serve customers, and think creatively. On the other hand, people working under command and control, as we more commonly know it will only work to achieve compliance, doing only what needs to be done to get by.
As a leader you must realise that every decision you make influences your next five decisions. Fortunately, great leaders are made, not born.
Maximise your effectiveness by emulating these words of wisdom that will motivate you in achieving your goals and overcoming your fears:
- Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs — Farrah Gray
- Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence — Unknown
- proverb is to speech what salt is to food — Arabic Proverb
- Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly — Langston Hughes
- Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent — Eleanor Roosevelt
- We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light — Plato
- Every strike brings me closer to the next home run — Babe Ruth
- If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln
- If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough — Oprah Winfrey
- I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination — Jimmy Dean
- Believe you can and you’re halfway there — Theodore Roosevelt
- Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover — Mark Twain
- To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart — Eleanor Roosevelt
- Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears — Les Brown
- Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve — Unknown
- I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions — Stephen Covey
- When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it — Henry Ford
- The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any — Unknown
- It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light — Unknown
- Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant — Robert Louis Stevenson
- The only way to do great work is to love what you do — Steve Jobs
- Change your thoughts and you change your world — Unknown
- The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me — Ayn Rand
- Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck — Dalai Lama
- You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have — Maya Angelou
- I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear — Rosa Parks
- I would rather die of passion than of boredom — Vincent Van Gogh
- A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new — Unknown
- If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else — Booker T. Washington
- Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless — Unknown
- Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart — Ancient Indian Proverb
- How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world — Unknown
- The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone — Ronald Reagan
- Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear — George Addair
- Nothing will work unless you do — Maya Angelou
- I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples — Mother Teresa
- What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality — Plutarch
- Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway — John Wayne
- Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm — Winston Churchill
- It always seems impossible until it’s done — Nelson Mandela
- Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential — John Maxwell
- Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- There are no traffic jams along the extra mile — Roger Staubach
- Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning — Gloria Steinem
- Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own — Peter Anderson
- The Book of Proverbs are the cream of a nation’s thought — Unknown
- Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it — Charles Swindoll
- The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity — Amelia Earhart
- When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life — John Lennon
4 Lies about Procurement You Probably Believe
The world of Procurement is seemingly full of impassioned people absolutely certain about what procurement is all about. Like other great lies, many of these half-truths and misleading ideas sound agreeable to the ears and come packaged as good advice from influential people.
How many of these popular lies have you fallen victim to?
1. Procurement should have a seat at the C-table
It’s not so much an outright lie as an irritating half-truth – but the damage comes with what Procurement people do with it. The thought behind this is well-intended: Procurement people should be able to speak the language of senior executives as easily as they can talk about FIDIC or demand forecasting. Terms such as EBITDA, ROIC, and economic profit should be part of their everyday parlance. Procurement issues are often the least understood by the board and the CEO and must be explained in their language.
What on earth could be wrong with that? Nothing – if the Procurement people have full cognisance of their own tools and language – and can be persuasive to senior people of the value of Procurement.
Now, that’s where we have, what is kindly referred to, as a skills gap.
In reality, for Procurement with no reputation (outside of that pesky metric of cost) and few business-aligned projects to call upon, it can be incredibly hard to try and catch senior people’s ear – never mind a C-seat (see what I did there?).
2. You must carry out a competitive tender to obtain value for money
I’m trying to distance myself from the public sector here (noting I did co-author the CIPS book on contracting in the public sector) but even in the private sector there’s a desperate need to get three quotes.
Why three quotes?
Not five, not 11? ‘Cos the rules say three; that’s why.
And the rules of Procurement policy and procedures, well, they can’t be broken because the CFO or the head of internal audit (all very commercial animals?) will be down on Procurement like a ton of bricks.
When the three quotes are received the following conversation occurs – the highest price is rejected – ‘they’re ripping us off’ followed by – and I love this one about the lowest price quotation – ‘the price is too low, they must have got the specification wrong’ – and the contract is awarded to the middle-priced one”¦.surely there’s a better way to deliver value for money?
Perhaps starting with actually defining it!
3. Procurement is the only source of governance for 3rd party spend
Being the only source would suggest a 100%, right?
I’d be amazed – and delighted – if Procurement governed half of all the 3rd party spend. Words such as ‘influencing’ are sometimes bandied about to shore up this lie. What a surprise that sales people are either trained, or very quickly learn ways, to actually bypass Procurement when selling.
And the reason?
Obviously marketing, IT, auditors fees, construction/property, recruitment (I could go on) is completely different, say the senior people in those departments – echoing the views of the oh so helpful sales people. And Procurement just never gets near, as they can’t articulate (deliver?) the value they can add.
I await the avalanche of people commenting on this telling me I’m wrong. Please be assured you are exceptional in Procurement.
4. Procurement welcome innovation and strategic relationships and anything other than lower price
Few businesses view Procurement as a strategic process. Most often, Procurement staff report to the CFO. This astonishing trend indicates that Procurement is still viewed as a financial / accounting activity and not an operational strategic activity that directly impacts the bottom line.
Suppliers; if you have an innovative product or service, recognise that Procurement’s ‘raison d’être’ is to deliver cost savings. That’s what they are measured on, that’s what the research with CPOs and the C-suite say is the #1 priority. There’s oodles of other priorities such as local sourcing, sustainability, innovation, partnering, risk management – I could go on and on and on. But that’s the one they get measured on. Think that through, next time you’re pitching.
The take-away
Perspectives on Procurement need to change, mature and grow up. Lies like these need to be re-evaluated and abandoned. Procurement needs to change the way they engage and manage suppliers and their internal stakeholders; ‘adding value’ (a dreadful phrase!) means so much more than asking for a discount.
Stephen Ashcroft BEng MSc MCIPS (speaking here, very much in a personal capacity!) is Associate Director, Procurement and Commercial Advisory at AECOM, a Fortune 500 company. He’s a procurement learner stuck in the body of a procurement veteran, and with over 20 years’ experience still sees the glass as half full. Working with leading organisations across diverse industry sectors, Steve helps clients reimagine procurement to drive improved performance. A recognised advisor, speaker, lecturer, and author; the ever-hopeful Kopite shares his bright-eyed/world-weary views on Twitter @ThinkProcure, LinkedIn and his blog.
34 Thought Provoking Change Management Quotes
Change is good. It’s also often hard. The status quo can be so much more comfortable. But to succeed in business, you must run toward change. Companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business
Here are 34 thought provoking change management quotes:
- It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change — Charles Darwin
- One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment — Robert E. Quinn
- Change before you have to — Jack Welch
- You must embrace change before change erases you.
— Rob Liano - Change before you have to — Jack Welch
- Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.
— Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organisational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behaviour, and Create an Agile Culture - People don’t resist change. They resist being changed! — Peter Senge
- If you want to make enemies, try to change something — Woodrow Wilson
- The key to change is to let go of fear — Rosanne Cash
- The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress — Charles Kettering
- There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things — Niccolo Machiavelli
- Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future — John F. Kennedy
- Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.
— Louis L’Amour - Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times — Niccolo Machiavelli
- Your success in life isn’t based on your ability to simply change. It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers and business — Mark Sanborn
- Change your thoughts and you change your world — Norman Vincent Peale
- If you don’t like change, you will like irrelevance even less — General Eric Shinseki (U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 1999-2003)
- We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn — Peter Drucker
- Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times
- — Niccolo Machiavelli
- All is connected, no one thing can change by itself
— Paul Hawken - Learn to adjust yourself to the conditions you have to endure, but make a point of trying to alter or correct conditions so that they are most favorable to you — William Frederick Book
- We would rather be ruined than change
- We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die — W. H. Auden
- Every generation needs a new revolution — Thomas Jefferson
- Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has — Margaret Mead
- I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s forward — David Livingstone
- Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself — George Bernard Shaw
- Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win— Max McKeown
- You can’t build an adaptable organization without adaptable people–and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to — Gary Hamel
- People will try to tell you that all the great opportunities have been snapped up. In reality, the world changes every second, blowing new opportunities in all directions, including yours — Ken Hakuta
- A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it — Chinese Proverb
- The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change — Bill Clinton
- Each of us has the opportunity to change and grow until our very last breath. Happy creating — M.F. Ryan
Change or die? we choose life! How about you?