This is a real Powell sentence, and it has a page number. It opens his discussion of Rule 8, “Check Small Things,” in the first chapter of It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership (New York: Harper, 2012) — Wikiquote’s sourced section places it at p. 18 of the 2012 hardcover first edition, and an independent transcription of Powell’s thirteen rules corroborates the opening sentences.
“Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things” Colin Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership (New York: Harper, 2012), 18 — from Rule 8, "Check Small Things." · Verbatim: “Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things — a feel for what is going on in the depths of an organization where small things reside.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Colin Powell — U.S. Army general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–1993 · Secretary of State, 2001–2005. Theme: "Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, New York, 22 May 2012
Page
p. 18 (2012 hardcover first edition)
Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things — a feel for what is going on in the depths of an organization where small things reside. The more senior you become, the more you are isolated by pomp and staff, and the harder and more necessary it becomes to know what is going on six floors down. One way is to leave the top floor and its grand accoutrements and get down into the bowels for real. Don’t tell anyone you are coming. Avoid advance notices that produce crash cleanups, frantic preparations, and PowerPoint presentations.
Rule 8 · p. 18
Reproduced from Wikiquote’s sourced entry for p. 18 ↗. One correction: Wikiquote reads “what is going in in the depths,” which appears to be a transcription slip; an independent transcription of Powell’s thirteen rules ↗ reads “going on in,” which is what we show. One difference we have not resolved: that same transcription reads “the more you are insulated by pomp and staff” where Wikiquote reads “isolated,” and it diverges again after “six floors down.” It is a transcription of the thirteen-rules list (which it dates to Parade in the early 1990s), not of the book chapter, so we follow Wikiquote, which cites the 2012 hardcover directly. We have not been able to check the page itself — the Internet Archive scan is lending-restricted.
Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ carries the passage under the heading It Worked For Me (2012), noting that all quotes in that block come from the 2012 hardcover first edition, New York: Harper — and cites this one at p. 18.
The passage belongs to Rule 8. A walk-through of the thirteen rules ↗ lists Rule 8 as “Check Small Things” and quotes this sentence there, citing chapter 1 of the book, “My Thirteen Rules.”
The book itself checks out: the Internet Archive’s catalogued scan ↗ gives Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2012, xii+283 pp., and Kirkus ↗ gives the release date as 22 May 2012.
We checked the obvious rival source and ruled it out: Oren Harari’s 1996 “Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer” ↗, the eighteen-lesson compilation drawn from My American Journey, does not contain the sentence. We found no appearance of the line before the 2012 book, and Quote Investigator has not published an investigation of it.
It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership was first published on 22 May 2012 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins — comfortably inside the U.S. copyright term, so the text is in copyright. Quoting the sentence with attribution is ordinary fair-use citation; reproducing the passage at length is not.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Not the wrong author — the missing citation
Unusually for a famous-name quote, nobody else is claiming this one. The problems are all downstream: the line is reproduced without a source, or clipped down to the half that sounds like a fridge magnet — and the one rival Powell document people reach for turns out not to contain it.
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Ruled outNot the 1996 “Leadership Primer” Checked and ruled out
Oren Harari’s widely circulated eighteen-lesson compilation, “Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer” ↗, is the document most people reach for when they want a Powell leadership maxim, so it is the first place we looked. It dates from 1996, draws on My American Journey, and does not contain this sentence. We are not claiming anyone credits the line to it — we found no such instance; we are recording that the obvious rival source is eliminated. The line is from the 2012 book.
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TruncationQuote aggregators and slide decks Clipped
What circulates is almost always the first sentence alone. In the book it is the premise of a longer argument that continues — per Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗ — through “the more senior you become, the more you are isolated by pomp and staff” to a concrete instruction to walk the building unannounced.
✓The attribution is sound and the citation is specific: chapter 1, “My Thirteen Rules,” Rule 8 — p. 18 of the 2012 Harper hardcover ↗. Quote the paragraph, not the fragment.
Context
Why the sentence is about more than tidiness
Powell’s thirteen rules had circulated for years as a list — short, punchy lines a general kept close at hand. What the 2012 book added was the reasoning behind each one, and Rule 8 got the most counter-intuitive defence. “Check Small Things” sounds like an argument for micromanagement. Powell frames it as the opposite: an argument against being managed by your own staff.
The full passage explains the mechanism. Seniority insulates you — “pomp and staff,” in his phrase — and the people actually doing the work live in a world of small things you can no longer see. So he prescribes a specific, slightly subversive habit: leave the top floor, go down unannounced, and skip the advance notice that produces crash cleanups and PowerPoint. The famous first sentence is the premise; the rest of the paragraph is the method.
The more senior you become, the more you are isolated by pomp and staff.
Where Rule 8 sits in the book
Chapter 1 of It Worked for Me is titled “My Thirteen Rules,” and it walks through the list in order: Rule 1 (“It ain’t as bad as you think”) through Rule 13 (“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier”). Rule 8 is “Check Small Things”; Rule 9, “Share Credit,” follows a couple of pages later, which is consistent with Wikiquote citing this passage at p. 18 and the “share the credit” passage at p. 21.
The book was published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, on 22 May 2012 — long after Powell left the State Department in January 2005.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1937–2021 · U.S. Army general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–1993 · Secretary of State, 2001–2005
Colin Powell (5 April 1937 – 18 October 2021) rose from ROTC at City College of New York to four-star general, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 and as U.S. Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. He wrote two books: the 1995 autobiography My American Journey, and the 2012 leadership memoir It Worked for Me, whose opening chapter finally set out in print the thirteen rules he had long been associated with. His management instincts were famously bottom-up — the sentence here is his argument that a leader who loses touch with the small stuff has lost touch with the organisation.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Chicago
Colin Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership (New York: Harper, 2012), 18 — chapter 1, “My Thirteen Rules,” Rule 8: “Check Small Things.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/success-ultimately-rests-on-small-things-lots-of-small/