Education Quote by Warren G. Bennis

Bennis is smuggling an argument about attention into what looks like a simple endorsement of greatness. “Mediocrity” is cast as ambient noise: it requires no effort to encounter, no discernment to absorb. The ordinary is the default curriculum of modern life, endlessly available in offices, institutions, and routines that reward risk management over imagination. So the real scarcity, he implies, isn’t information or experience but the kind of close study that trains judgment.

The line “excellence is a better teacher” isn’t just motivational; it’s methodological. Bennis is pushing back on the managerial habit of treating averages as truth. In organizational psychology, the “ordinary” is what shows up in survey means, standardized processes, competency models - useful, but flattening. Studying the exemplary, by contrast, privileges outliers: unusual leaders, high-performing teams, rare moments when a culture becomes bigger than its incentives. That’s where tacit knowledge lives: how trust is built under pressure, how courage looks in bureaucracies designed to punish it, how a vision survives contact with quarterly targets.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to cynicism. If you only study failure and dysfunction, you become fluent in diagnosis and impotent at creation. Bennis’s career, shaped by postwar institutions and the rise of corporate “leadership” as a field, insisted that leadership is learnable - but not from spreadsheets of the merely adequate. His subtext lands as a challenge: stop treating excellence as an anomaly to be admired from a distance. Treat it as data.