Bryant H. McGill Quotes

I'm a visionary. I'm not a maintenance person.

Don't manage - lead change before you have to.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

Our next CEO needs to thrive in a highly dynamic environment, to be capable of accelerating what is working very well for Cisco and disrupting what needs to change.

People will give you the responsibility, even the authority, to go after the big things, the visionary things, the reaching for incredible opportunities, if they trust that you're running a city well. And if you don't run a city well, conversely, you can't do the big things.

The opening of the Frontier is not an engineering problem. It is not a money problem. It is a challenge to our ability to decide to make it happen and to think and act the right way to get the results we want, we need, we demand.

Our leadership in D.C. should be bold and determined.

Life is like the monkey bars: you have to let go to move forward. Once you make the decision to leap into entrepreneurship, be sure to loosen your grasp on old concepts so you can swing your way to new ones.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

This business is always changing. If you're going to be a leader, you've got to take chances.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

It's so important to adapt, think outside the box, and stay ahead if you want to grow.

To build a great company, which is a CEO's job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

If you are going to make a change, make it big and bold. Walk up to the biggest guy on the block, stand in his face and get it started. Then go around, brigade by brigade, making it make sense.

We didn't know how to run a business, but we had dreams and talent.

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

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

You know, the truth is this: it is a leader's job to challenge the status quo. And when you do, you make enemies.

As the leadership team, we're taking bold and decisive action to evolve our organization and culture. This includes difficult steps, but they are necessary to position Microsoft for future growth and industry leadership.

To be successful be ahead of your time, but only a little.

The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I have really good timing. It's very easy for me to see what's coming up and it's no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media - none at all.

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.