Alan Mulally Quotes

I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.

Managers are important: they are leading the company and guiding and have to provide vision and manage the daily business.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.

Before you can change your industry positively, you need to understand how to go about doing so.

Many who know me or have worked for me are aware of my penchant for strategic planning. I consider it a critical component of the success of any organization and believe in the value of planning for a company's needs over multiple time horizons, as well as reviews against that plan at regular intervals.

As I looked across the company, there are three things that keep coming up that we need to work on: culture, our operating rigor, and capital allocation.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy. It is just a waste of resources.

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.

The best way to create a winning team is to train them, give them everything they need to get the job done and second, make sure they know what the job is and what the job will be. So you connect strategy to resources.

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.

What makes a good client, to me, is one that signed on for the strategy as well as the execution, not just the end product.

Leader. Ship. The word 'ship' is hidden inside the word 'leadership,' as its... derivation.

Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world.

Great leaders focus on equipping their team. It is unfair to expect what you did not equip.

Without organization and leadership toward a realistic goal, there is no chance of realizing more than a small percentage of your potential.

Management capability is always less than the organization actually needs.

There are a lot of decisions we pass up on because we think, "You know what? That's just going to build - you know, maybe that's going to build me and not build the ministry and what I'm trying to do." So we pass up on a lot of opportunities.

If we are to remain mission focused, as we must be if we are to be relevant in an uncertain age, the abandoning those things that do not further the mission is a leadership imperative.

Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.