Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Ronald A. Heifetz

What people resist is not change per se, but loss.

Your inspiration taps hidden reserves of promise that sustain people through times that induce despair. You enable people to envision a future that sustains the best from their past while also holding out new possibilities.

But to practice leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict

The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.

Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines.

Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.

I think that notion of leadership is bankrupt.

Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.

If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing.

Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness... But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion.

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

Stay diagnostic even as you take action.

Worry not that your child listens to you; worry most that they watch you.

Your behavior reflects your actual purposes.

Attention is the currency of leadership.

Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.

Progress on problems is the measure of leadership; leaders mobilize people to face problems, and communities make progress on problems because leaders challenge them and help them to do so.

Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation. People don't learn by staring into a mirror; people learn by encountering difference.

Values are shaped and refined by rubbing against real problems, and people interpret their problems according to the values they hold.

And leadership then is about mobilizing and engaging the people with the problem rather than trying to anesthetize them so you can go off and solve it on your own.