“One of the great dangers of transformational work is that the ego attempts to sidestep deep psychological work by leaping into the transcendent too soon. This is because the ego always fancies itself much more ‘advanced’ than it actually is.”
— Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
“Enlightenment is ego’s ultimate disappointment.”
— Chögyam Trungpa
“All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual”
— Albert Einstein
“Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews. That’s not even close. It should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on. Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant tours are an opportunity to meet promising new line managers. A coffee break at a meeting is an opening to coach a team member about to give his first major presentation. Think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend. Then watch everything bloom.”
— Jack Welch
“The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.”
— Agha Hasan Abedi
“Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
— Peter F. Drucker
“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
— Ronald Reagan
“We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Leaders who do not hold their people accountable to a set standard are, in effect, thieves and liars. Thieves because they are stealing from the stockholder who pays them to hold people accountable, and liars because they pretend that everything is OK with their people when in fact everything is not OK.”
— James C. Hunter
“The twin sister to autonomy and freedom is responsibility and accountability. You cannot have one with out the other. If someone is given an area of responsibility, not only must they be set free to do it, they must also be held accountable for what they do. Accountability clarifies freedom. In the teams and companies where you see boundary confusion, power struggles, control, over-reaching of one’s line of responsibility, you will also see lapses in accountability as well.”
— Henry Cloud
“I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a ‘transformer’ in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.”
— Stephen R. Covey
“We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.”
— Marianne Williamson
“[All] change, even very large and powerful change, begins when a few people start talking with one another about something they care about.”
— Margaret J. Wheatley