Sublime

Developing a field that encourages learning is the primary task of leadership, and perhaps the only way that a leader can genuinely influence or inspire others.

making progress on critical adaptive challenges becomes the basic measure of effective leadership in this approach.

a growing consensus among leadership theorists and practitioners is that in a networked society with power and information widely distributed, the presumption of “born leaders” along with command-and-control leadership models are inadequate.

the traditional heroic decision maker. In the Task Force, we found that, alongside our new approach to management, we had to develop a new paradigm of personal leadership. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

Ireland. She is moved by his conviction that a central piece of the practice of leadership is “helping people to see the contradictions in such a way that they can discover what is in everybody’s best interest”—what Heifetz describes as “recognizing the gap that signals adaptive work.”

a director in a theater production must exercise both the functions of authority—maintaining equilibrium within the social group—and the practice of leadership—mobilizing the social system to create a new reality.