Though-provoking quotes from my current management and leadership reading stack:

On Greatness:

“Indeed, if there’s one overarching message arising from more than six thousand year of corporate history…it would be this: greatness is not primarily a matter of circumstance; greatness is first and foremost a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”

-Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, writing in Great By Choice.

Here’s Hoping They are Wrong!

“Managerial contempt can improve performance even as it prompts aggression,” according to a study reported in the Research Watch section of the March, 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Understatement, Exclamation Point! 

“Leadership is enduring, dynamic and simple in theory but complex in execution.”

-John Hamm, writing in Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for Great Leadership.

On Bad Strategy and Leaders

“Bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy. It grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunctions.”

“To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks: fluff, failure to face the challenge and mistaking goals for strategy.

-Richard Rumelt, writing in Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters.

On the Power of Passion and the Challenge to Change

“In business as in life, the difference between insipid and inspired is passion.”

“Problem is, deep change is almost always crisis-driven; it’s tardy, traumatic and expensive. In most organizations, there are too many things that perpetuate the past and too few that encourage proactive change.”

-Gary Hamel, writing in What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change