Elliot Richardson Quotes

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

Effective management always means asking the right question.

If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss

Dad was an outstanding leader. He'd bring in top thinkers from a wide array of fields - how to fix the Detroit schools, for example. I watched him in these meetings. He listened and probed.

Candidates need to demonstrate strategic thinking and strong problem solving skills. And, just as importantly, they need to know when and how to ask for help.

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.

I'm very much a leader in a lot of the work that I do or that I've done in my career.

I've always thought Anne-Marie Slaughter would make a fantastic United States Senator or something. She's a real intellectual, but she's got enormous communicative skills and she's got government experience. The thing that drives me slightly crazy is the way we think about intellectuals as wooly, hopeless, arrogant, self-deceived, incapable.

The quality of a leader cannot be judged by the answers he gives, but by the questions he asks.

I don't think leadership demands 'yes' or 'no' answers; I think leadership is providing the forum for making the right decision, which doesn't demand unanimity.

The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.

You learn every single day when you're running a company. You learn as you go.

I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.

I am endlessly fascinated that playing football is considered a training ground for leadership, but raising children isn't. Hey, it made me a better leader: you have to take a lot of people's needs into account; you have to look down the road. Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy.

I'm kind of a builder of institutions. I think I've got some ability to look at what's out here, look at a playing field, and identify gaps and niches.

I work strategically with my management team to make all decisions.

The key things I learned as a hospital administrator are to be organized, communicate, and be flexible.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities.

Problem-solving becomes a very important part of our makeup as we grow into maturity or move up the corporate ladder.

The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

An executive is a person who always decides sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.