1. J o s h u a R o a c h ®
Quotes & Personal Notes on „Becoming a
Leader“
Joshua Roach®
All opinions expressed here are thoughts based on Warren Bennis´s Book „Becoming a
Leader“. I have intensely studied this book and have extracted for me the most relevant
information for this document. Hope you enjoy.
Warren Bennis „Becoming a Leader“
2. 2
STRUCTURE OF THIS DOCUMENT 3
FOREWORD 4
WARREN´S TIPS IN MY WORDS FOR BECOMING A LEADER 5
BEST QUOTES 9
APPENDIX 12
INGREDIENTS FOR BECOMING A LEADER 12
A LEADERS EDUCATION CONSISTS OF THESE THINGS 12
THE FOUR LESSONS OF SELF KNOWLEDGE 13
PRINCIPLE COMPONENTS OF INNOVATIVE LEARNING 13
LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE MEANS 13
THE MEANS OF EXPRESSION ARE THE STEPS TO LEADERSHIP 14
THE 4 INGREDIENTS FOR LEADERS TO GENERATE AND SUSTAIN TRUST 14
FAMOUS LAST WORDS 15
4. 4
Foreword
Hello everyone,
Thank you for taking the time to read my notes on this book. A very
clever decision if I say so myself. J
Before you begin acquiring all of the knowledge I have written up here
for you, I want to thank Warren Bennis for writing this incredible book.
He was a true visionary, an innovator and most importantly of all, an
original.
His book has motivated and informed me in ways I would have never
thought possible.
Secondly I would like to thank my father for recommending this great
book to me and giving me the chance to write this summary.
With these things all said and done I still recommend buying the book
and having a quick read through it now and again. Or if you like my
notes just read through them when you need some good Warren
Bennis wisdom.
I hope I could reach more people with this and open your eyes maybe
even give you a new perspective.
Joshua Roach (aged 16)
17. June 2016
5. 5
Warren´s tips in my words for becoming a leader
1. Leaders are made not born
2. Adult learning, never cease to learn
3. Adults learn best when they take charge of their own learning
4. Learning is simply remembering what´s important
5. Psychoanalysis is less a form of healing than a form of learning
6. Becoming the kind of person who is a leader is the ultimate act of
free will, and if you have the will, this is the way
7. Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself
8. Our quality of life depends on the quality of our leaders
9. Our basic needs are economic not political
10. Todays leaders often reinvent themselves periodically in order to
scale new mountains
11. The first step in becoming a leader is to recognize the context for
what it is – a breaker not a maker, a trap, not a landing pad, an
end not a beginning – and declare your independence
12. A leader without a vision of where he wants to take his
organization is not a leader
13. Norman Lears success steps:
a) Becoming self expressed
b) Listening to the inner voice
c) Learning from the right mentors
d) Giving oneself over to a guiding vision
6. 6
14. Listening and trusting the inner voice against all odds
15. Find out what you are about. Be what you are
16. If we are creatures of our own context, prisoners of habits,
practices, and rules we will be made ineffectual. But we must learn
from the people who do not only challenge and conquer the
context but who change it in fundamental ways. The first step
toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to
choose to deploy yourself.
17. Leaders never lie to themselves, especially about themselves,
know their faults as well as their assets, and deal with them
directly
18. Never trim your principles or ideas to please
19. Leaders have to have learnt to be:
- dedicated
- observant
- capable of working with and learning from others
- never servile
- always truthful
20. Leaders are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They
embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.
21. Leaders invent themselves through developing character and
vision
22. Don´t dwell on your limitations, focus on your possibilities
23. Good leaders engage the world. Bad leaders entrap it
24. They fully engage and deploy themselves
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25. A leader innovates and is a original
26. A leader has a long range perspective
27. A Leader asks: “What and Why ?”
28. Writing is the most profound way of codifying your thoughts.
Writing is the best way of learning from yourself who you are and
what you believe
29. Applauding yourself for the small successes, and taking the small
bow, are good ways of learning to experience life each moment
that you live it. And that’s part of inventing yourself, of creating
your own destiny.
30. People begin to become leaders at that moment when they
decide themselves how to be.
31. Leaders learn from others, but they are not made by others
32. True learning begins with unlearning
33. Those who travel farther from home learn even more
34. Real leadership has more to do with recognizing your own
uniqueness than it does with identifying your similarities
35. Leaders learn to lead by leading
36. When everything is working well, that is the moment where you
should reflect
37. As a company we are responsible towards our employees, our
customers, and the community at large. Not only to our
shareholders
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38. Having learned from the past, leaders live in the present, with one
eye on the future
39. Vision is dynamic, not static, and must be renewed, adapted and
adjusted
40. Think strategically and invest in the future – but keep the numbers
up
41. Be entrepreneurial and take risks – but don’t cost the business
anything by failing
42. Continue to do everything you´re currently doing even better and
spend more time communicating with employees, serving on
teams, and launching new projects
43. Know every detail of your business but delegate more
responsibility to others
44. Become passionately dedicated to “visions” and fanatically
committed to carrying them out but be flexible, responsive, and
able to change direction quickly
45. Speak up, be a leader, set the direction but be participative, listen
well, cooperate
46. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into the entrepreneurial game and
the long hours it takes and stay fit
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Best Quotes
1. Warren Bennis: “Today there are 304 million Americans and we
wonder every four years, why we can´t find at least two superb
candidates for the nations highest office.”
2. Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”
3. Abigail Adams: “ Great suffering often engenders great
leadership, but pain does not guarantee it.”
4. Richard Ferry: “ Corporate America may talk, on an intellectual
level, about what it´ll take to succeed in the twenty-first century,
but when it gets right down to decision making, all that matters is
the next quarterly earnings report. That’s what’s driving much of
the system. With that mind-set, everything else becomes
secondary to the ability to deliver the next quarterly earnings
push up. We´re on a treadmill. The reward system in this country is
geared on short term.”
5. Warren Bennis: “ Some in America are still addicted to the quick
fix and the fast buck. They haven´t yet realized that the new
bottom line is that there is no bottom line – there aren’t any lines,
much less limits or logic. Life on this turbulent, complex planet is
no longer linear and sequential, one thing logically leading to
another. It is spontaneous, contrary, unexpected and ambiguous.
Things do not happen according to plan, and they are not
reducible to tidy models. We persist in grasping at neat, simple
answers, when we should be questioning everything.”
6. Warren Bennis: “Today, the opportunities for leaders are
boundless, but so are the challenges.”
7. Norman Lear: “ First and foremost, find out what it is you are
about, and be that. Be what you are, and don´t lose it … It´s very
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hard to be who we are, because it doesn´t seem to be what
anyone wants.”
8. Warren Bennis: “ The leader who communicates passion gives
hope and inspiration to other people.”
9. Warren Bennis: “ You are your own raw material. When you know
what you consist of, and what you want to make of it, then you
can invent yourself. “
10. Warren Bennis: “ It is one of the paradoxes of life that good
leaders rise to the top in spite of their weaknesses, while bad
leaders rise because of their weaknesses. “
11. Norman Lear: “ The goal isn’t worth arriving at unless you enjoy
the journey.”
12. Warren Bennis: “ If you go on doing what you´ve always done,
you’ll go one getting what you’ve always got.”
13. Gib Akin: “To learn is not to have it is to be.”
14. Warren Bennis: “ The unexamined life is impossible to live
successfully. Like oarsmen, we generally move forward while
looking backward, but not until we truly see the past and
understand it can we successfully navigate the future.”
15. John Gardner: “ The maturing of any complex talent requires a
happy combination of motivation, character and opportunity.”
16. Warren Bennis: “ Strike hard, try everything, do everything,
render everything, and become the person you are capable of
being.”
17. Warren Bennis: “ A thousand things happen in a week to each of
us, but most of us remember the few lapses rather than our
triumphs, because we don’t reflect. We merely react.”
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18. Jamie Raskin: “ One of my heroes is a professor at Harvard Law
School named Derek Bell. He told me that it´s more important to
have ambitions in terms of the way you want to live your life, and
then the other things will flow out of that.”
19. Warren Bennis: “ Whatever it is you want to do, you shouldn’t let
fear get in your way.”
20. Carlos Casteneda: “ The basic difference between an ordinary
man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a
challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or
a curse.”
21. Kurt Lewin: “ If you want to truly understand something, try to
change it.”
22. Jacob Bronowski: “ We have to understand that the world can
only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The most
powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill.
He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he
loves to do it better.”
23. Barbara Corday: “ It´s time to change your life or your work the
moment you stop having butterflies in your stomach.”
24. Norman Lear: “ Everywhere you trip is where the treasure lies.”
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Appendix
Ingredients for becoming a leader
1. Guiding vision (Know what you want to do)
2. Passion (Leaders love what they do !)
3. Integrity (self-knowledge, candour and maturity)
4. Trust ( product of leadership has to be earned)
5. curiosity and daring ( taking risks, learning as much as you can)
A leaders education consists of these things
(Which means these are the words most used to describe a real leader)
- inductive
- tentative
- dynamic
- understanding
- ideas
- broad
- deep
- experiential
- active
- questions
- process
- strategy
- alternative
- exploration
- discovery
- active
- initiative
- whole brain
- life
- long term
- change
- content
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- flexible
- risk
- synthesis
- open
- imagination
The four lessons of self knowledge
1. You are your own best teacher.
2. Accept responsibility. Blame no one.
3. You can learn anything you want to learn.
4. True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.
Principle components of innovative learning
Anticipation = active and imaginative
Learning by listening to others
Participation = shaping events rather then being shaped by them
Learning from experience means
- Looking back at your childhood and adolescence and using what
happened to you then to enable you to make things happen now,
so that you become the master of your own life rather than it´s
servant.
- Consciously seeking the kinds of experiences in the present that
will improve and enlarge you.
- Taking risks as a matter of course, with the knowledge that failure
is as vital as it is inevitable.
- Seeing the future – yours and the worlds – as an opportunity to
do all those things you have not done and those things that need
to be done, rather than as a trial or test.
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Conflicts: Resolution:
Blind trust vs. Suspicion Hope
Independence vs. Dependence Autonomy
Initiative vs. Imitation Purpose
Industry vs. Inferiority Competence
Identity vs. Confusion Integrity
Intimacy vs. Isolation Empathy
Generosity vs. Selfishness Maturity
Illusion vs. Delusion Wisdom
The means of expression are the steps to leadership
1. Reflection leading to resolution
2. Resolution leading to perspective
3. Perspective leading to point of view
4. Point of view leading to tests and measures
5. Tests and measures leading to desire
6. Desire leading to mastery
7. Mastery leading to strategic thinking
8. Strategic thinking leading to full self-expression
9. The synthesis of full self expression = leadership
The 4 ingredients for leaders to generate and sustain trust
1. Constancy. Whatever surprises leaders themselves may face,
they don’t create any for the group. Leaders are all of a piece,
they stay the course.
2. Congruity. Leaders walk their talk. In true leaders, there is no
gap between the theories they espouse and the life they
practice.
3. Reliability. Leaders are there when it counts, they are ready to
support their co-workers in the moments that matter.
4. Integrity. Leaders honour their commitments and promises.
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Famous Last Words
Congratulations on making it to the end of this document. The more
experience you get, the more you will I think agree with what Warren
Bennis is teaching us.
Personally I read through these notes many times to remind myself of
their wisdom.
As I said at the beginning of this document, this book has inspired and
motivated me and I hope you can now see why.
And don’t forget, never stop reflecting! Even if that means taking a
walk at 2 am in the morning - I mean why not !?
Don’t be conquered by fear or society.
That´s all I have to say.
- Joshua -
