Leadership Quote by Lee Iacocca

Leadership, in Iacocca's telling, doesn’t begin with a quarterly report; it begins with a palm-to-palm signal that you recognize other people exist. The line lands because it’s almost embarrassingly small: not a grand strategic miscalculation, not a catastrophic product bet, just forgetting to shake hands and be friendly. That scale is the point. In the corporate mythology Iacocca helped write - the hard-driving savior who could talk Wall Street into patience and engineers into miracles - this confession punctures the “tough genius” pose and replaces it with something more transactional and more human: rapport as infrastructure.

The intent is managerial and self-mythmaking at once. He’s offering a teachable moment, but he’s also defending a style of leadership built on visibility. Handshakes are stagecraft, yes, but also information-gathering: Who feels seen? Who feels ignored? In a large organization, friendliness becomes a low-cost way to reduce friction, to make the chain of command feel less like a choke chain.

The subtext is a warning about power’s blind spots. Status lets you forget the rituals that everyone else must perform. “I forgot” admits how quickly authority can slide into insulation, how easy it is to treat people as functions instead of participants. Coming from a businessman famous for salesmanship and turnaround swagger, the line quietly argues that charisma isn’t optional gloss; it’s part of the work. The handshake isn’t manners. It’s governance, practiced at arm’s length.