I was recently reading about the highly successful Marc Leder, co-founder of Sun Capital Partners, the private equity investment firm. Leder has been successful throughout his life from education to his first job at Lehamn Brothers where he worked himself up from junior analyst to Senior Vice President. Mr. Leder has also involved himself in philanthropic activities as well as his success with Sun Capital Partners, a truly inspirational man.

I am often inspired in business by stories like Leder’s as well as inspirational quotes which I have posted all over my house and office. I wanted to share with you some of my favorites in the hope that they can inspire you too.

“There is a difference between being a leader and being a boss. Both are based on authority. A boss demands blind obedience; a leader earns his authority through understanding and trust.” Klaus Balkenhol

“Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas?” Margaret Thatcher

“If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.” G.K. Chesterton

“Great leadership is about human experiences. It’s not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.” Lance Secretan

“Leadership is not magnetic personality that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’–that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” Peter F. Drucker

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: It was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow a weak trumpet.” Theodore Hesburgh

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”  Colin Powell

“Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” Vince Lombardi

Do you have some favorite leadership quotes? If so let us know in the comments section below, we’d love to hear what you think.

One of the greatest pleasures in life, believes Walter Viola, is to open a brand new book and not being able to put it away again until all has been read. When people are in school, they are forced to read certain books, the literary classics. However, it is after that when people’s love for reading really starts to shine through. The time when they have the choice to pick a book that they genuinely like themselves, a book that grips and captivates them. Of course, whether a book is good or not is a subjective concept. You may personally feel that Dean Koontz is the best writer of all times, and that Jill Mansell writes things suitable only for toilet reading. Someone else, meanwhile, may believe that Marcel Proust’s books should be devoured, while J.K. Rowling’s writings are just for children. That said, there are some books that have been released this year that are absolute must reads. Let’s take a look at Walter Viola’s personal best reads list.

The Top Reads of 2017 According to Walter Viola

1. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Novel

This is the latest novel by Roy, which is a graceful and intricate story of magic, and how love can men lives broken by tragedy. It is a storytelling book, but one different from all others. 20 years ago, Roy published The God of Small Things and it took him two decades to write his new book, but it was worth waiting for.

2. David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

This book is a true story, albeit a story few people now of, about serial murder and oil, as it occurred in the 1920s on the Osage Indian Reservation. It is one of those books that leaves you angry at the world, and at how inhumane and arrogant our forefathers have been. It also points the many imperfections society still has to overcome.

3. Fredrik Backman’s Beartown: A Novel

Backman is perhaps best known for his novel, A Man Called. However, Beartown is something completely new. It is about truth-telling and soul-searching. In the novel, a small town where everybody is mad about hokey is rocked by a crime that nobody wants to believe in.

4. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West: A Novel

This novel is futuristic in nature, in which young lovers run from a Middle Eastern country. They hope to find safe refuge in a western country, but cities like London are overrun by settlements of refugees. Hamid is best-known for his novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and he uses this new book to point out that all humans are refugees of some sort.

5. Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Patricia Lockwood had to move back into her parental home. Her father was a priest, but one passionate about electric guitars. Her mother, meanwhile, obsessed over Satan worshippers and disasters. Moving back in reminds Lockwood of her childhood, and the book is essentially a remembering of all that happened to her as a child.

On the grand scheme of things, the concept of studying management practice and theory is quite new. In fact, it didn’t start until the beginning of the 20th century. The emphasis then was strong on looking at what made enterprises human. While this is still of importance now, experts like Larry Polhill Cafe Valley believe it is no longer enough.

Larry Polhill Cafe Valley on Demands of the 21st Century

Today, people management is no longer solely about understanding people. It is about being collaborative. The director of investors at APFC, for instance, must be able to work together with the president of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but also with the individual team members of both organizations. Collaboration isn’t just about interpersonal relations or being friendly. That’s been done now. It is about truly working together to improve businesses as a whole, while putting the business first.

Being Part of a Business

The aim should be on achieving results. These results should be measurable, precise, and clear. Employees shouldn’t just be developed in a rewarding environment that supports growth. Rather, it is about acknowledging that one of the greatest resources of a business is its people and that businesses can only achieve real results if its people perform properly.

According to Polhill, this must begin with marketing. This is what gives employees a truly clear focus to work towards, while at the same time understanding what their focus market is. Essentially, people need to know the business that they are in. Only if people understand this, and are committed to it, will they work towards the success of the organization.

Staff selection is, obviously, of huge importance. They have to be the people who perform the way you expect them to. At the same time, this means that you have to have full clarity on what your expectations are. You cannot rush this, but need to properly prepare yourself by analyzing your needs.

Secondly, you have to have the right systems in place. These must be designed to completely avoid failure. Having poor systems means poor performance, which equates to failure. Having good systems in place, however, will motivate people to do better.

What Does the Performance Manager Do?

Performance managers are no longer about staff supervision and holding the hand of the employee while micromanaging them. It is about trusting that you, as a manager, have enabled your employees to do their job properly. If they fail, it is because you failed. It is also about acknowledging their contributions, as this will encourage them to contribute even more. That is the essence of the 21st century manager, but also of the 21st century team. Team building, in a sense, is a thing of the past. Today, it is about team “development” instead. This means there is an emphasis on the interpersonal relationships that exist not between manager and team, but rather between the different members of the team, which the manager is also a part of.