Traditional managers worry about how to get things done, whereas great managers worry about what things get done (and trust their team to figure out how to do it).

In the postmodern universe, everything is relative, and moral values are the most relative of all.

Fix it, or the little problem becomes a big one.

The craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.

Three classic accounts of disease in history are Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), Geddes Smith, A Plague on Us (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1941), and William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).

Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.

It was difficult to grasp, the hardest and most painful of all the dichotomies of leadership: to care about your men more than anything in the world—so much so that you’d even willingly trade your life for theirs—and yet, at the same time, to lead those men on missions that could result in their deaths.

When we are right, let’s try to win people gently and tactfully to our way of thinking, and when we are wrong – and that will be surprisingly often, if we are honest with ourselves – let’s admit our mistakes quickly and with enthusiasm.

Vengefulness and indignation are clues to the presence of an arrogant, narcissistic—and ultimately very scared—ego.