Leadership Quote by Bill Owens

Leadership gets romanticized as a kind of personal voltage: the indispensable figure who outworks everyone, outthinks everyone, and carries the whole operation on sheer will. Owens punctures that myth with a politician’s pragmatism. “Lead is a verb” sounds like a pep talk, but it’s also a trapdoor: if leadership is action, the temptation is to equate action with doing everything yourself. His warning targets that familiar political pathology where visibility becomes a substitute for management, and martyrdom gets mistaken for competence.

The line works because it couples two truths that leaders hate holding at the same time. Yes, leadership demands initiative, decisiveness, motion. But effectiveness depends on restraint: choosing what not to do, delegating what others can do well, and building systems that survive your absence. In government, that’s not just self-care; it’s institutional survival. A governor, mayor, or committee chair who hoards decisions creates bottlenecks, breeds resentment, and turns the office into a one-person failure point. Burnout becomes policy risk.

“And in a powerful hurry” is the tell. It’s plainspoken, almost folksy, but it carries a veteran’s edge: burnout isn’t a distant consequence, it’s the predictable endpoint of performative overfunctioning. Owens is implicitly arguing for a less cinematic model of leadership - one rooted in trust, distributed authority, and the humility to admit that the job is too big for any one ego. That’s not lowering the bar. It’s raising the odds that anything actually gets done.