The document highlights key concepts from Warren Bennis's book 'On Becoming a Leader,' emphasizing that leadership is about personal character, self-expression, and continuous development. It outlines essential traits of effective leaders, including curiosity, adaptability, empathy, and vision, asserting that true leaders are self-made through experiences and learning. The text also distinguishes leaders from managers by their innovative nature and the necessity of teamwork in addressing complex challenges.

1. 20 Remarkable Quotes from
“On Becoming a Leader”
Book by Warren Bennis
Curated by @IliyanaStareva

2. Leadership is first being,
then doing.

3. Leadership is always about
character. Developing character
and vision is the way leaders
invent themselves.

4. Full, free self-expression is the
essence of leadership.
The key to full self-expression is
understanding one’s self and the
world, and the key to understanding
is learning—from one’s own life and
experience.

5. True leaders are not born, but
made, and usually self-made.
Leaders invent themselves.

6. Becoming a leader is synonymous
with becoming yourself.
It’s precisely that simple, and it’s
also that difficult.

7. Curiosity and daring are two basic
ingredients of leadership. Leaders wonder
about everything, want to learn as much
as they can, are willing to take risks,
experiment, try new things. They do not
worry about failure, but embrace errors,
knowing they will learn from them.

8. The truth is, we’re products of everything—genes,
environment, family, friends, trade winds, earthquakes,
sunspots, schools, accidents, serendipity, anything you
can think of, and more. The endless nature-nurture
debate is interesting, even occasionally revelatory, but
inconclusive. Like everyone else, leaders are products
of this great stew of chemistry and circumstance.
What distinguishes the leader from everyone else is
that he or she takes all of that and creates a new,
unique self.

9. The leader does it better and
better and better, but is never
satisfied.

10. Ideas are now the acknowledged
engine and currency of the global
economy. For leaders, and would-
be leaders, the take-home lesson
of the New Economy is that
power follows ideas, not position.

11. But the one competence that I now realize is
absolutely essential for leaders—the key
competence—is adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is
what allows leaders to respond quickly and
intelligently to relentless change. Adaptive capacity
allows today’s leaders to act, and then to evaluate the
results of their actions, instead of relying on the
traditional decision-making model, which calls for
collecting and analyzing the data, then acting.

12. Leaders are, by definition, innovators.
They do things other people have not
done or dare not do. They do things in
advance of other people. They make new
things. They make old things new. Having
learned from the past, they live in the
present, with one eye on the future.

13. The leader who communicates
passion gives hope and
inspiration to other people.

14. The first basic ingredient of leadership is a
guiding vision. The leader has a clear idea
of what he or she wants to do—
professionally and personally—and the
strength to persist in the face of setbacks,
even failures. Unless you know where you’re
going, and why, you cannot possibly get
there.

15. One reason that leaders are able to
promulgate their vision is because
they are exquisitely attuned to their
followers and feel their pain, their
wants, their needs. Leaders, in every
field, are richly endowed with
empathy.

16. I tend to think of the differences
between leaders and managers as
the differences between those
who master the context and those
who surrender to it.

17. We still tend to think of leaders, like artists, as
solitary geniuses. In fact, the days when a
single individual, however gifted, can solve
our problems are long gone. The problems we
face today come at us so fast and are so
complex, that we need groups of talented
people to tackle them, led by gifted leaders, or
even teams of leaders.

18. Integrity is the basis of trust,
which is not as much an ingredient
of leadership as it is a product.
It is the one quality that cannot be
acquired, but must be earned.

19. No leader sets out to be a leader.
People set out to live their lives,
expressing themselves fully. When
that expression is of value, they
become leaders.

20. So the point is not to become a leader. The
point is to become yourself, to use yourself
completely—all your skills, gifts, and
energies—in order to make your vision
manifest. You must withhold nothing. You
must, in sum, become the person you started
out to be, and to enjoy the process of
becoming.

21. To an extent, leadership is like beauty:
it’s hard to define, but you know it
when you see it.

22. Thank You!
@IliyanaStareva
Channel Consultant @HubSpot
www.iliyanastareva.com