Leadership Quote by Antony Jay

Real leadership, Antony Jay suggests, is less about heroics in the moment than about choosing the right scale of difficulty in the first place. The line flatters the ambitious while quietly indicting the reactive: anyone can “cope with the waves,” the daily churn of emails, crises, headlines, and internal politics. The leader’s obligation is colder and harder-to-measure: “watch the tide,” the slow, structural forces that make those waves inevitable.

Jay’s phrasing is doing double duty. “Judge a leader” frames leadership as an evaluative category, not a vibe; it invites accountability. “Size of the problem” is a trapdoor for ego, because “big problems” can mean vanity projects. But the second sentence sharpens the standard: the tide isn’t spectacle, it’s pattern. Watching it requires patience, literacy in systems, and the willingness to be bored by what ends up being decisive: demographics, technology shifts, culture change, institutional incentives. In other words, leadership is prediction plus preparation, not performance.

Context matters: Jay wrote about organizations and power, and the metaphor fits a mid-to-late 20th century managerial world obsessed with “firefighting.” His critique lands cleanly in today’s panic economy, where leaders are praised for viral responses to waves they helped create. The subtext is almost moral: if you’re constantly battling waves, you’ve outsourced strategy to weather. The tide is where responsibility actually lives.