Lao-tzu On Leadership

I am in Aspen, Colorado this week, teaching at the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics. We are spending the day doing a variety of different types of economic experiments.

In our meeting room there is a quote from Lao-tzu on leadership that I’ve always liked:

A leader is best
When people barely know that
he exists,
Not so good when people obey and
acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
?Fail to honor people,
they fail to honor you;?
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done,
his aim fulfilled,
They will say
?We did this ourselves.?

3 thoughts on “Lao-tzu On Leadership”

  1. Neither to put words in Zathras’s> mouth nor, hopefully, to be too snarky but perhaps what Zathras meant was quite a few Western ideas of Chinese thought are based on Lao-Tzu.

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