Inspirational Quotes

A leadership comfort zone brings stagnancy, deprives one of innovation, stifles growth and frustrates both the leader and the team they lead. Your personal preferences like leadership style, communication style, prejudices, habits and mannerisms must be effectively managed so that they do not work against you. You have to be careful that your strengths do not end up becoming a hindering comfort zone. Seek to lead, driven by a cause.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Realise your Stewardship role as a parent – you raise children to offer a quality gift to society. Even your spouse should not be treated as an object or possession you own; support them to be the best of what they were created to be. Do your part and trust God for the rest. If you have empowered them, trust them to be responsible.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Empower your children - Allow self-discovery and self-awareness (their own key to success), Facilitate an environment for learning through experience (practice of knowledge acquired). Remember, this exploration will take place whether you approve or not – it’s inevitable, that’s why YOU MUST be in charge of providing awareness and exposure to improve the quality of decisions made during exploration and experimentation.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Having a succession and legacy plan in place will make you ready for forced changes due to circumstances beyond your control, like death, any form of incapacity, sudden changes in laws and regulations and even corporate scandals and moral failure.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Passing the baton - Oh what a challenge this has proven to be in many societies, families, businesses, governments, religious organizations and obviously in every other relay race! Why do this? - for starters, you will not live forever – how about that? After a given mileage, even a car will need new tyres!

~ Archibald Marwizi

Leadership success means your mission and vision must outlive you, but this will not happen by accident. We have enough stories around us to prove that lasting legacies have to be well managed, planned and structured for continuity. If not, you will carry your name, success and influence to the grave, only leaving short-lived memories of your achievements and impact.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Start planning from your internal or spiritual view of things. The external view always has a way of distorting, discouraging and limiting your dream.

~ Archibald Marwizi

When you have pictured and defined your desired legacy, allow your present life activities and efforts to begin reflecting the future you desire. Begin to do what you want to see, become involved in the causes you want to be a part of. Show your legatees how you want and expect things to be done after you are gone. This will enable them to fit the vision into their own as they make their own individual unique mark.

~ Archibald Marwizi

A leader, who divides his own people, contaminates his platform and begins to destroy his own territory.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Consider your will to be the vision of your influence on earth after you cease to be a part of it. Crafting a lasting legacy means you start planning and making it possible now.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Release children as part of your delegated leadership influence - this will enable you to leave a legacy worth noting. Realise the risk in delegation and bestowing this trust - if you sacrifice a rib, you expose your heart to possible pain, hurt or pride, fulfilment and joy. When these come – it’s not the end of the world, be brave enough to face the challenge with a positive attitude.

~ Archibald Marwizi

There are batons that you will obviously choose to pass on, upon your death, but there are others that would be advisable you pass on whilst you are still alive. Implement as practicable as possible, all succession elements that can be done whilst you are still alive so that you can ensure they are done according to your will/desire.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Do not do everything for your children – teach them personal responsibility and accountability. This includes using your home environment – the kitchen, the garden, making their room/bed, chores – as training platforms. Prepare them to be independent.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Open the door for communication and interact with your children. Provide the answers (if you don’t know, look for them or get expert advice). Guide them on how to deal with other sources of information – friends, TV, other media, society or the internet. Coaching empowers them to make their own informed, quality decisions.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Timing is a critical issue when it comes to succession. Passing the baton too early or too late could both cause irreparable damage. The timing just has to be right, but again you are responsible for creating or influencing the right conditions over the course of your leadership tenure.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Teach faith as a non-negotiable - What should your family be aware of? Why should they be aware of these things? How will they become aware? When and at what stages must they become aware?

~ Archibald Marwizi

It’s about teamwork, realizing we are on the same side and complementing each other. The family is at its best when exposed to and engaged in high-quality environments, interactions, and relationships. This is not technological or economic quality – it is leadership and effectiveness quality. Children mature best when the adults in their life work in partnership with one another. There must exist important aligning of mission, beliefs, values and behaviours within the family unit.

~ Archibald Marwizi

A leader must produce other leaders. Why do you want to produce followers, when by being called a leader the assumption is that you already have followers? Influence those who follow to birth their kind and develop others to lead.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Begin to invest in productive capacity, and the ability to see people flying or shining on the platform you have set for them in support of your vision. You need to draw the best out of them so that the reach and impact of your vision becomes phenomenal. See them as your extension, the multiplication of the tentacles of your vision and mission – sometimes when they shine, they are not trying to replace you at all, they are trying to be a “little you” somewhere you cannot be, as you focus on other key strategic issues elsewhere.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Alignment of vision, mission, values and attitudes need to be matched between you and those you choose to surround yourself with. The cost of training or replacing will be very minimal and less painful if recruitment, selection and positioning are done well. This applies even to general employment processes, whether at leadership or staff levels.

~ Archibald Marwizi

It is the challenge for every leader to develop and invest in those he depends on, to ensure his or her vision is realized in the way it has been put upon the leader’s heart. These key people will enhance the success or taint the leadership image and brand of the visionary.

~ Archibald Marwizi

You choose the leaders and place them strategically around the table of your vision and mission. They are already around you because of some degree of loyalty, so if you continue putting 80% effort in enhancing loyalty that already exists, you will end up going into overkill and igniting a toxic level of internal office politics that was not originally existent in your organisation.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Change in leadership brands must be influenced and proactively effected at a personal level, it can never be forced from outside with sustainable effectiveness. Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak are all political trophies, yet the effects of the military or “civil” initiatives that toppled them, are nothing to be proud of considering what continues to happen in countries like Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, after the use of force to bring political change.

~ Archibald Marwizi

The African Challenge - We must end conflict in Africa. We must lead to allow the Africans to enjoy the benefits from their natural resources. We must end poverty in Africa. Every African must be educated, have access to health care and a fair chance to fulfil their dream. Preventable sickness and disease must not reduce life expectancy or rob pregnant women of a chance to continue living. Africa must develop. Africa must not depend on foreign aid. Africa must be united and governed more effectively. Africa must customize her leadership culture and philosophy in a way that gives her global relevance and respect but still remain true and authentic to herself. Will you accept the challenge? Will you be that Africa?

~ Archibald Marwizi

If in this generation, you still consider yourself the only one who knows or who has the capacity to make a difference, it’s a shame because you are delaying this leadership excellence train from reaching its destination. Make a decision to change your leadership philosophy and agenda today!

~ Archibald Marwizi

Every leader must be challenged to educate their followers and capacitate them with knowledge, tools and a voice to champion their own causes and become actively involved in setting the agenda for citizen participation in social transformation. Don’t create a dependent constituency; develop and lead other leaders who demonstrate a growing personal responsibility for their own success as well as for those around them.

~ Archibald Marwizi

The lack of knowledge on the part of followers perpetuates a culture of abuse by bad leadership. Every day, issues are being endorsed in the name of standing for the ignorant masses, only to benefit those who sponsor the agendas. Priorities are set and resources allocated, never to benefit or reach those cited as the underlying justification for sourcing the funds or setting the priorities.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of

~ Charles Dickens

The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.

~ Steven Brust

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

~ Toni Morrison

If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!

~ Cath Crowley

The point of art is to inspire you to create your own.

~ Misha Collins

Art is literacy of the heart.

~ Elliot Eisner

To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change

~ Cassandra Clare

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

~ China Miéville

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

~ Leonard Bernstein

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

~ Boris Pasternak

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two...But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad...

~ Dave Eggers