Make winners out of every business in your company. Don't carry losers.

I might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I'm pretty good at getting most of the other bulbs to light up.

Be candid with everyone.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Change before you have to.

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.

Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.

When I take up my pen to write, I feel the strength of standing up and refusing to be silent. In an oppressive situation, silence is death.

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

It is so much in the nature of men to overreach and deceive one another, that their very sports and plays are founded on that principle.

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.

When you know what's important, it's a lot easier to ignore what's not.

My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can.

-Oh yes? Can you identify yourself? -Certainly. I'd know me anywhere.