Leadership Quote by Warren G. Bennis

Bennis draws a scalpel-thin line through a workplace culture that loves polish more than purpose. "Do the right thing" isn’t a Hallmark prompt here; it’s a challenge to institutions that can become exquisitely efficient at the wrong priorities. By pairing leaders with moral direction and managers with procedural excellence, he turns a common corporate compliment - "great operator" - into a faint indictment. Competence, in this frame, is not the same as judgment.

The phrasing works because it’s a neat chiasmus: right thing / things right. That rhetorical symmetry makes the distinction feel self-evident, almost natural, which is precisely the trap Bennis wants you to notice. If the sentence feels obvious, it’s because organizations train us to treat "right" as a matter of method rather than meaning. He smuggles in a values argument under the cover of managerial language.

Context matters: Bennis came of age professionally as mid-century bureaucracies swelled, and later watched 1980s-90s corporate life canonize process, metrics, and "professional management". As a psychologist of organizations, he wasn’t just praising visionary CEOs; he was diagnosing a system that rewards risk-avoidance and compliance. The subtext is that management is often about maintaining legitimacy, while leadership is about taking responsibility for consequences - especially when the "right thing" is unpopular, ambiguous, or costly.

It’s also a warning against outsourcing ethics to spreadsheets. When performance becomes the religion, "doing things right" can launder bad decisions into respectable outcomes.