Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen’s line sounds soft until you remember who’s talking: the famously hard-nosed ITT chief who helped define the modern conglomerate era. That’s the tension that makes it work. In the age of management-by-memo and performance reports thick as phone books, he argues that motivation isn’t a poster on the break-room wall; it’s the ambient weather created by the boss. “By everything you do” quietly demotes speeches and slogans. People watch budgets, calendars, and reactions under stress. They take cues from what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how quickly support evaporates when numbers dip.

The intent is managerial, but the subtext is moral: credibility is behavioral, not rhetorical. Geneen is effectively saying that leadership is a daily referendum. Your “everyday attitude” becomes a kind of informal contract. If your default mode reads as cynical, distracted, or self-protective, no incentive plan will feel like anything other than extraction. If your default mode reads as steady backing, risk-taking looks survivable, and “superior performance” becomes less about fear and more about permission.

Context matters because Geneen’s corporate world prized control systems and measurable outputs. This quote doesn’t reject that machinery; it complements it. Support is framed less as tenderness than as a performance technology: trust reduces friction, ambiguity, and second-guessing. “Wholeheartedly” is the tell. It’s an all-or-nothing word in a workplace where employees can smell half-hearted alignment instantly. The line is a reminder that culture is not what leaders announce; it’s what they routinely embody.