This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Transactional leaders approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions… The transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.
Looks | Motives | Relationship | Leader | Leadership |
The best and the deepest moral training is that which one gets by having to enter into proper relationships with others… Present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
David Cooper, fully David Graham Cooper
Perhaps the most central characteristic of authentic leadership is the relinquishing of the impulse to dominate others.
Impulse | Leadership |
The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it.
Capacity | Leadership |
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right.
Habit | Life | Life | Means | Right | System | Training | Will |
Antony Jay, fully Sir Antony Rupert Jay
The only real training for leadership is leadership.
Training | Leadership |
Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder
Only by being permitted to experience the consequences of his actions will the child acquire a sense of responsibility; and within the limits marked by the demands of his safety this must be done. From such training we can expect many benefits to the person, one of which will certainly be the development of a natural rather than an imposed control over [himself].
Consequences | Control | Experience | Responsibility | Sense | Training | Will | Child |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.
Power | Reality | Understanding | World | Leadership |
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
A true leader does not seek followers, he wants to teach others how to be leaders. He does not want control, he wants the truth. He does not impose his leadership on others, nor does he take away anyone's autonomy. He inspires by love, not coercion. When it comes time to take credit, he makes himself invisible; but he is the first to arrive at the time of need, and he will never shrink away in fear. He is so passionate about your welfare that when you consult him for guidance, it is like coming face to face with yourself for the first time.
Coercion | Control | Credit | Fear | Guidance | Love | Need | Teach | Time | Truth | Wants | Will | Leader | Leadership |
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.
Contradiction | Responsibility | Work | Leadership |
It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
Books | Education | Important | Learning | Mind | Need | Training | Learn | Think | Value |
You should display your training in inductive reasoning against a young man, in deductive against an expert.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Art | Excellence | Habit | Training | Virtue | Virtue | Art |