Bruce Riedel Quotes

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

[Describing her role:] It's like running a big corporation and a little country at the same time.

In our government we drive decisions either by leadership of by crises. If the leadership is not there, we rely on crises.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Managing a country is like managing a company in many ways. It maybe involves more complicated issues, but it's the same skills.

And David consulted with the captains of thousands and hundreds, and with every leader.

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Leadership is working with goals and vision; management is working with objectives.

The difference between management and administration (which is what bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Clearly, every company needs a leader. That's an important part of being the CEO of the company.

Management is getting people together to figure out how to transform inputs into outputs. In the process of figuring out the process of how people work together, you've got to figure out who's got what responsibilities, and how do they work together.

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.

Forget the consultants, the pundits and the pollsters; good policy is good politics.

Business requires understanding financial matters, but management is different from running the financial aspects of the business - it requires understanding complex systems, how they operate, the nature of organisations, what happens when people interact in groups and how to motivate and guide people.

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.

I think that in any group activity - whether it be business, sports, or family - there has to be leadership or it won't be successful.

In my opinion, the most important thing in governance is management control.

There is no school that teaches you how to run a state. You make mistakes, but you learn on the job.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

A President in a ... crisis makes, say, 10 bets a day. Maybe I made the wrong choice three times.

Running a country is much more difficult than running a campaign.