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I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

I look for the consensus because the consensus drives the policy into new places.

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

That is where consensus-building begins-with the idea that you have your own truth, but that the negotiator on the other side of the table has his own truth as well.