About

Leaders, in their own words

Impact Chiefs is a collection of quotes from people who had outsized impact in business, sport, government, and the arts. It is organised by leader and by topic, so you can read one person in depth or look across many for what they said about hiring, decisions, failure, or building a team.

How we treat quotes

Quotes are often wrong on the internet: shortened, reworded, or credited to the wrong person. So each quote here carries a status.

• Verified source: the words were checked against a primary source, such as the published text or a recording of the speech.
• Source: a source is cited, but we have not checked the wording against the original ourselves.
• Disputed or misattributed: the quote is commonly credited to this person, but the evidence is weak or points to someone else. We say so and show what is known.
• No source yet: we found the quote repeated widely but have not yet traced it.

Where a recording exists, a quote links to the moment it is said. Sources are cited the way a reference work would cite them, with the title, publisher, date, and the date we last looked.

Where quotes come from

We start from published collections and reference works, then trace each quote back toward its original source. Speeches are checked against the official text and the recording. Some of the work is done with the help of AI tools to sort quotes by topic, and the result is reviewed.

Corrections

If a quote is wrong, misattributed, or you can point us to a better source, we want to fix it. Write to hello@impactchiefs.com.