Frances Hesselbein Quotes

Effective leaders help others to understand the necessity of change and to accept a common vision of the desired outcome.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

I think whenever you come in, whenever you try to evolve a company, people will get nervous. But, if you articulate a clear vision, a clear mission to help them understand their roles in it and ask them to buy into the system, everyone will band together to make it happen.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

Your ability to shape your future depends on how well you communicate where you want to be when you get there. When ideas are communicated effectively, people follow and change.

You don't implement change easily in Japan unless you explain very clearly why you need to do this change, how you're going to do this change and what's going to be the outcome of this change. If you offset or you forget to explain one of these three steps you're not going to do it.

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

Multiple mergers can be challenging because people come from different backgrounds.

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.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

What is clear is that business leaders must commit to champion change - to be transparent about their goals for change, to align their incentives systems to drive the change, and to make sure their work environments are flexible in a way that allows men and women who choose to work to be able to achieve all of their potential.

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

Managers develop organisations; leaders develop people.

I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.

Great leaders communicate a vision that captures the imagination and fires the hearts and minds of those around them.

The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

I think there's a lot of things that need to be changed in the business.