Global Leadership Summit Live Blog – 25 Leadership Quotes From Bishop T.D. Jakes On Migrative Thinking

For the next two days I will be live blogging the Global Leadership Summit.  This is a special moment as the Summit will be celebrating its 25th year of investing in leaders.  As we prepare to learn from this year’s speaker lineup, I want to take a look back at last year’s best leadership quotes.

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The first day’s final speaker was Bishop T.D. Jakes.  Bishop Jakes has a proclivity to disrupt the status quo, and is one of the most globally-recognized influencers in business, education, film and entertainment. With his earnest approach, Jakes has been able to reach millions of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, races, nationalities and creeds. Bishop Jakes is most known as the senior pastor of The Potter’s House, a global humanitarian organization and 30,000-member church.

The following are 25 Leadership Quotes From Bishop Jakes’s session on Migrative Thinking:

1. Most people with relevance stay so by staying in their zone.
2. How we see the world is a reflection of our worldview and past experiences. Many leaders have the luxury of willful blindness.
3. In controlled environments, we control the environment… Except we are living in a time that cannot be controlled.
4. You cannot afford to be ignorant of someone else’s language… You can’t assume your client is you.
5. I need to migrate my thinking to world uncomfortable for me to have relevance outside myself.
6. I make a living breaking up fights. I’m a referee.
7. I cannot raise marriages from the dead. I can do to stop them from talking over each other.  I can train to hear what the other person is saying.
8. Your world is not the world and how do we broaden our world?
9. We are better together than we are apart.
10. Many of us lack the imagination or exposure that your background has influenced you. You are walking with an absolute that is really an abstraction.
11. AQ – Adaptability Quotient. How can you adapt when you’re outside your comfort zone?
12. Have the courage to forsake the plumb line of your past experience and to migrate into an environment and not surrounded by your own experiences.
13. The world will not allow us to become isolated. We must become migrative in our thinking.
14. I don’t like to operate where I don’t know the rules.
15. You shouldn’t have to be forced to get out of the box.
16. We can no longer silence the people we can’t control.
17. The CEOs on the cutting edge can no longer just speak to the CEOs.
18. If you can build a demographic different from yourselves and have respect for them, we can level the playing field.
19. Corporate Leadership, Spiritual Leadership, Community Leadership, Corporate Leadership. If reasonable cannot come together, unreasonable people will take over the conversation and we will suffer the consequences of unreasonable people ruling in our silence.
20. Build a coalition you can’t control.
21. Sit down with someone who has a perspective you can’t teach. Become a student where you’re better at listening than you are at talking.
22. The road to connectivity starts with what connects you than what divides you.
23. Admit you don’t know what you don’t know.
24. You cannot be what you do not see. You cannot change what you do not touch.  You cannot heal what you won’t lay a hand on.
25. The only hope for our society is to hire people who have migrative thinking.

What an incredible day!  I can’t wait for Day 2 of the Global Leadership Summit.  Make sure you check back regularly for live blog updates.

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