49 Quotes by Douglas Conant

The corporate world has the resources to improve the world. It's where people live and work.

Most people think of leaders as being these outgoing, very visible, and charismatic people, which I find to be a very narrow perception. The key challenge for managers today is to get beyond the surface of your colleagues. You might just find that you have introverts embedded within your organization who are natural-born leaders.

You have to be a well-rounded leader. You can't fly by the seat of your pants anymore. You have to be incredibly tough-minded about standards of performance, but you also have to be incredibly tenderhearted with the people you're working with.

If you're a wounded company, the other companies that have been around for a hundred years will smell it, and they will take advantage of you in a heartbeat. It takes a long time to get back in fighting form.

It would be counterproductive to tell people exactly what they are supposed to do and exactly how they are supposed to do it to a point where they become more concerned about your expectations than about completing their work in a quality way.

I've met so many leaders who realize that telling your colleagues something that is on your mind is so much easier than keeping it in. Sometimes the things we make up in our heads are not nearly as big a deal as we think.

Often leaders have the best intentions, but people cannot read their minds. That's why it's important to declare yourself: Tell people why you choose to lead and the code you live by.

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

I would assert that highly effective leaders are made more than they're born. Every leader I know who's been highly effective has worked hard at it, and they've been students of it. The more you're a student of leadership, the more you figure out what works for you and the more effective you're going to be.