Today's Maxwell Quote

From A More Excellent Way (1967), 30:

Focusing on the mechanics of leadership, which are certainly necessary, could ignore the underlying skills and traits that rest on fundamental concepts without which no system of techniques, procedures, mechanics, and follow-up can possibly work. It does very little good, for instance, to develop elaborate organizational and flow charts if the people who inhabit the real world symbolized by these charts do not trust each other or really communicate with each other. It does little good to strive to achieve goals if we allow ourselves, as leaders, to be too much at the mercy of our moods so that we are experienced by followers as ambivalent administrators whom others find unpredictable or capricious concerning the goals we espouse.