Donella Meadows Quotes

Personal Vision is often the catalyst for wise decisions.

Good plans shape good decisions. That's why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

In life, the first thing you must do is decide what you really want. Weigh the costs and the results. Are the results worthy of the costs? Then make up your mind completely and go after your goal with all your might.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them.

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

The most challenging part of being CEO is communicating to 200,000 people what you want done.

It's one thing to really dream and have a vision and want all these cool things, but it's a whole other thing when you actually have wisdom and understand things. Then you can truly make the best decisions.

Leadership is the key to 99 percent of all successful efforts.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

A leader is the one who can outline the broad vision and the direction, and say here's where we are going to go, here's why we need to go there, and here's how we are going to get there. A manager is the one who actually gets up under the hood and tunes the carburetor.

Sometimes you have to create a vision, a path for a vision. It may not be apparent, and you may have to forge it yourself. And that will be the way to move your life forward.

Showing leadership doesn't mean every employee will run the organization; that would lead to chaos. Businesses do need someone to set the vision and then lead the team to it.

A manager is a guide. He takes a group of people and says, 'With you I can make us a success; I can show you the way.'

My feeling is if you're going to be a leader, you have to carefully assess where people are and where people want to go.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

I always feel that the best kind of producing - and frankly, it has to do with what I like to do - is you're the big-picture person.

You have to have an idea of what you need to do, what needs to be fixed, what can be improved, what we should now imagine together which we didn't previously imagine. And having thought of it, decide to go it. And that's the government's role.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Don't be afraid to have a big vision, but make sure it's a clear one.

Leadership is inspiring people. Management is keeping the trains running on time.

Managing through ambiguity can be difficult for even the most experienced leaders. Defining a clear set of goals for your team demonstrates that there is an end in sight. However, it's crucial during this time to move through the transition in phases.

Good managers ensure good outcomes, but great leaders can deliver a vision by getting people to work together.

You can't do anything successfully in life without leadership.