Ordway Tead (10 September 1891 – November 1973) was an American organizational theorist, adjunct professor of industrial relations.
Leadership is that combination of qualities by the possession of which one is able to get something done by others, chiefly because through his influence they become willing to do it.
Ordway Tead "The Nature and Use of Creative Leadership". In: Bulletin of the Taylor Society. Vol 12, Nr.3. p. 394.
[Committees are] a tool of the democratic, knowledge-pooling, and desire-harmonizing process which cannot be otherwise forwarded. And when committees fail, as they sometimes do, it is because the limits to their role are not clearly understood or because they have not benefited by proper leadership from the chairman.
Ordway Tead (1935) Creative Management: The Relation of Aims to Administration. p. 39.
Administration is the process and agency which is responsible for the determination of the aims for which an organization and its management are to strive, which establishes the broad policies under which they are to operate and which gives general oversight to the continuing effectiveness of the total operation in reaching the objectives sought.
Ordway Tead (1945) Democratic administration. p. 67.
Sooner or later a democracy which is to survive has to be able to rely upon that enlargement of vision and purpose of those individuals who compose it, which means that their craving for devotion and self-sacrifice is satisfied in a democratic society on a nobler level, and with a finer recognition of the value of individual personality than is true of a national purpose of a totalitarian state under a dictator.
Attributed to Ordway Tead in: Forbes (1950) The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life. p. 138.
Ordway Tead (1935) The art of leadership, McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Leadership is the activity of influencing people to cooperate toward some goal which they come to find desirable.
p. 20; As cited in: Joseph Clarence Rost (1993) Leadership for the Twenty-first Century. p. 48.
p. 83; As cited in: Preston J. Beil (1956) Variety store retailing: A text and basic reference book for the multi-billion dollar variety store and popular-priced general merchandise market. p. 90.
This means that he possesses clarity and precision as to the objectives, purposes or aims that he desires for himself and his group, and that he holds these deeply enough and permanently enough to see them well on the way to being realized. Purposefulness to be effective requires that the aims are: (1) definite; (2) readily communicable to others; (3) potentially attractive to others; and (4) vigor¬ously, persistently and enthusiastically sustained by the leader.
p. 91; as cited in: William Sykes "Visions Of Hope: Leadership." Published on August 12, 2012.
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.
p. 115; as cited in: William Sykes "Visions Of Hope: Leadership." Published on August 12, 2012.
Recently often attributed to Ordway Tead.
Attributed to Antony Jay in older sources, see: Public Administration Review (1977). Vol. 15. p. 20.
Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativeness.
To build something that endures, it is of great importance to have a long tenure in office-to rule for many years. Quick success can be achieved in a year or two, but nearly all great tycoons have continued their building much longer.
This page was last edited on 22 October 2018, at 20:48.