Eisenhower on Leadership

Intelligence can be defined as the ability to observe seemingly nonexistent patterns.

The best is the enemy of the good.” War, he believed, was not about perfection, but about doing the best you could do as soon as you could possibly do it. Waiting for perfect conditions meant losing present op

In any enterprise requiring the collaboration of intelligent people—and that means just about any enterprise worth doing—the “underlying cause,” or motivating principle, should never remain a guarded secret or a vaguely articulated cliché. People work for money, it is true, and a fair salary may produce a fair day’s labor, but it is a shared vision that makes possible the best work

We fear and distrust strong personal leadership on a large scale because it seems primitive, a throwback to more reckless times, and we prefer to comfort ourselves with the notion that our collective fate lies not so much with a single person as it does with a whole system, one that includes certain checks and balances.