John P. Kotter Quotes

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

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.

Turnaround or growth, it's getting your people focused on the goal that is still the job of leadership.

To me, success in the job is setting a vision, guiding an organization through change - which is exactly what I did at Digitas, and I'm very proud of that - and bringing people together and with you. That, to me, is what it takes to be successful.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

First of all, you've got to have a vision of 'What kind of program do I want to have?' Then you've got to have a plan to implement it. Then you've got to set the example that you want, develop the principles and values that are important, and get people to buy into it.

Leaders tend to focus on 'what to do,' but the real issue is more often 'how to do it.'

As a leader, you have to have a vision that inspires people around you.

Ambition is important for any manager or coach, owner or director.

Resources follow vision.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

True leadership isn't about having an idea. It's about having an idea and recruiting other people to execute on this vision.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

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

Vision with action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.

There is something to this vision thing.

Leaders create a sense of urgency. And along with that you have to create a sense of hope and a direction.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

Management is different from leadership..

Vision without execution is delusion.

One man of tolerable Abilities may work great Changes, and accomplish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and … makes the execution of that same plan his sole Study and Business.

Execution without a long term strategy leads nowhere. Likewise a long term strategy without execution leads nowhere.

Some people are really good at the visionary role. They're like third grade teachers who tell people the vision and values over and over and over until they get it right, right, right. But they're not implementers. If they're good leaders, they gather people around them who can take the implementation role and move it forward.

I think that the CEO is responsible for setting the vision, for articulating the mission, and for building a team of powerful evangelists that share that mission and that passion, because no one person can do anything by themselves.