Words matter. These are the best Douglas Conant Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My most memorable meal is every Thanksgiving. I love the food: the turkey and stuffing; the sweet potatoes and rice, which come from my mother’s Southern heritage; the mashed potatoes, which come from my wife’s Midwestern roots; the Campbell’s green-bean casserole; and of course, pumpkin pie.
I strongly believe that you can’t win in the marketplace unless you win first in the workplace. If you don’t have a winning culture inside, it’s hard to compete in the very tough world outside.
Leadership does take work. And it should. If you aspire to be a leader, you ought to treat leadership as a craft, you ought to become a student of it, and you ought to work at it. And if you’re not willing to work at it, well, you get what you give.
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.
The corporate world has the resources to improve the world. It’s where people live and work.
You have to talk about mistakes and then talk about what you have learned and how to move forward. You acknowledge missteps right away, you deal with them, and you move ahead.
If you cultivate a relationship in a genuine, thoughtful way, people will be more inclined to want to help you even though they don’t have to help you.
Too many leaders are so caught up in the momentum of work that they lose sight of the opportunity to connect with people. I discovered that the more fully present I was with other people, the more fully present they were with me, and the more productive our relationship became over time.
You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into.
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.
The time to build a network is always before you need one.
The packaged food business environment is very Darwinian. You’re fighting for survival every year; you evolve and grow or you die. It’s really that simple.
If you have people who are high-performing working for you, it’s so easy to do your job. Otherwise, you can’t even agree on the time of the meeting or who will bring the coffee.
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.
Ultimately as a leader, you’re evaluated on how you interact with people. If you do it well, you develop a reputation as effective leader. If you don’t, you develop a reputation for being a highly ineffective leader.
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.
People lead complicated lives and aren’t hanging on your every word or the company mission statement. You have to become a broken record of your expectations of the organization and show people why it is relevant and how it works in specific ways.
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.
Extroverts may get places faster, but for introverts it’s all about working at the pace you need and, at the end of the day, performing at your best.
Even a brief interaction can change the way people think about themselves, their leaders, and the future. Each of those many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone’s day.
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.
You must bring great resolve to your work. It’s not all a bed of roses.
