---
title: "3 Quotes about Leadership we should listen to"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/3-quotes-about-leadership-we-should-listen-to.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/3-quotes-about-leadership-we-should-listen-to.html"
published: "2010-07-18T11:33:32+00:00"
updated: "2011-04-04T22:45:38.397000+00:00"
tags: ["Link Love", "Meta"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Three leadership quotes shared on Twitter, from Christopher Columbus on courage, Henry Ford on faster horses and Peter Drucker on efficiency."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# 3 Quotes about Leadership we should listen to

Some inspiring words from twitterverse today:

> @WilnaMurphy: You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. - Christopher Columbus.

> @leadershipcoach: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." ~Henry Ford

> @aycangulez: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker

## Read next

- [Things to consider when building a new team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/things-to-consider-when-building-a-new-team.html): What to look for when building a new software team: experts willing to teach, people who enjoy working together, and people with time to learn and grow.
- [Video: Team Leadership in the Age of Agile](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-team-leadership-in-the-age-of-agile.html): A link to the InfoQ video of Roy Osherove's QCon London 2011 talk on what team leaders need for agile to succeed and how leadership fits team maturity.
- [A Manifesto For Software Team Leaders - Take 1](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-manifesto-for-software-team-leaders-take-1.html): The first draft of a manifesto for software team leaders, a list of leadership values open for reader comments, written ahead of the Stoos summit.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/