Nader’s is the one that costs something
“Produce more leaders, not more followers” sounds like a pleasant aspiration until you notice what it asks a leader to give up. Followers make you necessary; leaders make you replaceable. Every incentive in most organisations runs the other way, which is why the sentence has been quoted for fifty years and acted on considerably less often. Welch is describing the same discomfort from the inside: the moment the job stops rewarding your own excellence and starts measuring other people’s.
Mencius got there first by twenty-three centuries
The oldest line in this room is from Mencius, around 300 BC, and the newest from 2005. Nine of the twenty are sourced exactly, which is above the museum's average and unusual for a business-adjacent theme — leadership writing is normally a swamp of unattributed aphorism. The reason is that the good lines here mostly come from people who wrote books rather than from people who gave talks, and books have page numbers.
What is the best quote about leadership?
Ralph Nader’s — “the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” It is the only one that supplies a test you can actually fail, and most leadership does.
Did John Quincy Adams say “if your actions inspire others…”?
It is credited to him almost universally but cannot be traced to his writing or speeches, so it is labelled attributed here. The sentiment is consistent with him; the sentence is not documented.
What is the full version of “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them beco…”?
Goethe wrote in German, so every English version is a translation. A closer one runs: “When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved.” The collection cites it to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book VIII, ch. 4.