Grace Lee Boggs Quotes

Really, people are not a school of fish. Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

The campaign was a more significant training ground than I think people give it credit for. By the time I got here, I think I had a pretty good sense of what was required. But the circumstances in which I came in were different than most executives, right? The enterprise was in the midst of a major crisis.

Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.

In a crisis, the man worth his salt is the man who meets the needs of the situation in whatever way is necessary.

A lot of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing in the middle and doing something about it.

Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

When you get a big crisis, everyone wants somebody with some experience and some credibility.

The leader needs to create an environment in which people can analyze the situation and develop a good response.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

September 11 was horrific, but I've been through enough crises before that I had my own pattern as to how to collect facts, what a leader should do, how to communicate with people, how to set up operating mechanisms to work our way through it.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.

Novice leaders often respond dramatically to provocations.

Commander in Chief of Disasters.

The leadership we saw in our communities may not have looked like leadership that you see in the external world, but the leadership existed. You could find the leadership just by seeing who people go to when there's a time of crisis in the community.

As a politician, you can run from your problems or run toward your problems.

In the heat of battle you might not be thinking clearly and that is when players have to take on the responsibility of helping the other guys out.

An important part of leadership is being able to hold two things in your mind at once: Dealing with the reality, whatever it may be, and focus on hope for the future. Any leader helping an organization through challenges needs to be able to do both.

I've always been calm, and I'm very good in a crisis.

When you hear 'experience,' that's all about resume. And Obama didn't have the resume. But we knew, long before that, 'steady in a crisis' was much more important than 'experience.' When you watched the presidential campaign, you saw that Obama was the one who happened to be steady... He demonstrated aspects of his character people were hungry for.

When you are in a situation or a crisis, you need to define, what is the unique role that I can play?

You become a leader in times of trouble. Leaders emerge when things don't go well. When everyone else starts pointing fingers, a leader takes responsibility.

We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.

Without a vision people in leadership positions perish. You not only lose your people, you lose the person who is in a leadership position - you lose it all.

Leaders learn to leverage the problems that never go away in a way to create progress for the organization.