Madeleine Albright Quotes

Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult.

Consensus building doesn't necessarily fit with my experience.

If you really wish to be independent and make your own judgements about everything important, it is difficult to be a good team player —because a team has different criteria for making judgements about an issue.

For running a country, team work is important, and the person at the helm has to enjoy teamwork.

When we come into the NSC, everybody has different opinions. At the end of the day, we present the president with all the facts. We let him make the decision. And we all, as a team, go out and support that decision.

Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.

We don't always agree on stuff, but when it's time to blow the whistle and start the game, we're not still debating.

I always step back and look at - you know, look at my background in playing team sports my whole life and taking that approach into Congress. It's not about me going, and you know, feeding my ego going to Congress.

If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Teams are often pretty clear about what they can do or are willing to do.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

The only thing we don't do together is get in front of an actor and show any indecision at all about what we think. We don't always agree, so we meet privately, then one or the other will approach the actor.

I played on teams with 24 guys pulling the rope one way and one guy pulling the other. I've seen how destructive it can be. I tell them, 'If 13 of you are insanely successful and one fails, we all lose.'

I think leadership is knowing what you want to achieve and then purposefully and sensibly taking steps to achieve it, remembering always that you have got to bring people with you if you are seeking to be a successful political leader.

You can have the best people in the business, but if they're not collaborating - and they're butting heads - then it's all going to go south.

I worked with a group of people who argued day and night - professors, officials, the Minister of Finance - but there were decisions that I had to make.

Anything where people have to work together makes me cry.

Any committee is only as good as the most knowledgeable, determined and vigorous person on it. There must be somebody who provides the flame.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You're trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren't very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

Leadership consists of picking good men and helping them do their best.

But Eddie does not make all the decisions. Eddie can listen to reason; Eddie can be swayed or talked in or out of certain things. Eddie allows other people to lead in this band and to have certain roles that are very fundamental to the decision-making process.

Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word.