I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work.

Institutions which have too much security ... tend to become bureaucratic. They add layers of people and layers of rules in order to assure the security of not making mistakes.

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news. ... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

Self is a construct, a feeling, an identity that is internal and can neither be given nor taken away by others. We develop and nurture that identity by embracing inter-dependence.

Nothing creates more self-respect among employees than being included in the process of making decisions.

Trust is perhaps the most critical single building block underlying effectiveness. Without trust leaders do not have followers. Without trust, leaders are impotent despite great rhetoric or splendid ideas. Trust rests on the belief among followers that the leader is transparent: What you see is what there is. Trust means followers believe there is no duplicity; no manipulation just to satisfy the leader's ego. Very simply: The effective leader is transparent; that's why that person is trusted.

Leaders evoke emotional connections in followers only to the extent that the followers are emotionally needy.