This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.
Capacity | Purpose | Purpose | Vision | Leadership |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.
Style | Universe | Vision | Leader | Leadership |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause.
Myth | People | Qualities | Leadership |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires 'courageous patience'.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Action | Capacity | Energy | Intention | Reality | Wise | Leadership |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
The expert knowledge of agriculture developed in the universities, like other such knowledges, is typical of the alien order imposed on a conquered land. We can never produce a native economy, much less a native culture, with this knowledge. It can only make us the imperialist invaders of our own country.
To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of the cutting edge in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.
Faith | Loneliness | Vision |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another; they might also ask themselves how much poetry of any period they can honestly say that they understand.
Dawn | Day | Heart | Insult | Mortal | Vision | World | Insult |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
John, she said, does it make every one unhappy when they study and learn lots of things. He paused and smiled. I am afraid it does, he said. And, John, are you glad you studied? Yes, came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, I wish I was unhappy,—and—and, putting both arms about his neck, I think I am, a little, John.
Beauty | Heart | Life | Life | Longing | Mistake | Music | Sorrow | Talking | Time | Vision | World | Beauty |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
There is only one principle of war and that's this. Hit the other fellow, as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't lookin'.
Little | Thought | Leadership | Thought |