Colin Powell Quotes

If you take the pay, earn it. Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don’t disappoint yourself.

Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it’s an excuse and not a reason.

When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishment or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility.

Officers have been trying for hundreds of years to outsmart soldiers and have still not learned that it cannot be done. We can always count on the native ingenuity of the American GI to save us from ourselves, and to win wars.

Colin Powell’s Rules It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning. Get mad, then get over it. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. It can be done! Be careful what you choose. You may get it. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours. Check small things. Share credit. Remain calm. Be kind. Have a vision. Be demanding. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

IT AIN’T AS BAD AS YOU THINK. IT WILL LOOK BETTER IN THE MORNING.

Leadership is all about people. It is not about organizations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people — motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people centered.

Colin Powell

People need recognition and a sense of worth as much as they need food and water.

With vision only, you get no follow-through. With enforcers only, the vision is realized but leaves a lot of wreckage. Good chaplains pick up the pieces and put everything together again.

In Prosperity Our Friends Know Us. In Adversity We Know Our friends.

Humans are not by nature solitary. They need to connect with other human beings to share dreams and fears, to lean on each other, to enhance each other.

You can leave behind you a good reputation. But the only thing of momentous value we leave behind is the next generation, our kids — all our kids. We all need to work together to give them the gift of a good start in life.

You are the leader and the troops will reflect your emotions.

The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks. The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.

To single out your worst failure or least favorite person will surely make news . . . and your obituary writer’s day.