Leadership Quote by Bob Anderson

The line carries the blunt impatience of someone who has watched organizations use hierarchy as a convenient alibi. Anderson isn’t romanticizing “leadership”; he’s attacking the bureaucratic reflex to treat agency as a scarce resource rationed out by titles. “You can’t always wait” frames delay as a moral failure, not just a logistical one. It’s a rebuke to the culture of permission, where inertia hides behind process and everyone stays clean by staying passive.

The repetition does the heavy lifting. “Every manager at every level” is a deliberate flattening of the org chart: authority may be vertical, but responsibility is distributed. By insisting on “big or small,” Anderson cuts off the most common escape hatch - the belief that only grand, CEO-sized moves matter. The phrase “sphere of autonomy” is quietly radical in corporate language: it concedes constraint while refusing helplessness. You may not control strategy, but you control standards, feedback, staffing choices, meeting norms, how information flows. That’s where culture actually lives.

“Don’t pass the buck up the line” lands as both warning and diagnosis. Passing the buck is how mediocrity becomes systemic: it creates plausible deniability, stretches timelines, and trains people to optimize for cover rather than outcomes. The subtext is that leadership is less a position than a practiced habit - the habit of acting inside your remit before the problem calcifies into “above my pay grade.”