In picking Min Cho as one of its top female business leaders for last year, the Washington Business Journal noted that she has exploited two valuable assets to re-engineer Nova Datacom, an IT security company: her knowledge and her connections.

The two 27-year-olds who’ve built Method into the world’s largest green cleaning brand have had to endure plenty of setbacks in short order. So far, they’ve muddled through. Eric Ryan, the marketing guy, and Adam Lowry, the chemical engineer, ginned up their first cleaning sprays early in 2001 from ingredients such as coconut oil and corn. Almost immediately, they ran into flak:

Hold more productive, inspiring meetings by stealing a rule from Google’s playbook ... Squeeze breathing room into your day by scheduling meetings for 50 minutes rather than 60 ... Improve your team’s performance with this exercise ... Use these seven words more often in 2010.

Leading is easier than not leading, says Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, 12-time marathoner, college professor, boxer, White House fellow and humanitarian. The combat veteran used his combat pay and a few vets to launch The Mission Continues, which trains wounded service members for leadership. More than 30 vets have been through the program. Greitens’ goal: 100 wounded or disabled vets as fellows this year.

If you're relying solely on your memory to evaluate employee performance, you're making appraisals far more difficult than necessary. That's why it's best to institute a simple recording system to document employee performance. The most useful, easy-to-implement way is to create and maintain a log for each person. Follow these six steps:

There’s good reason why 40% of executives describe themselves as introverts. From discount broker Charles Schwab to Avon chief executive Andrea Jung, “innies” possess these five traits of quiet leadership:

For years, one of the biggest drivers of improved worker productivity has been better technology in the workplace. But all that technological innovation means that employees who want to keep up must be open to training. How you handle that training can make a big difference when the time comes to lay off employees you no longer need because your company has become more efficient or whose skills have become obsolete.

Joe Englert, a developer of nightspots in Washington, D.C., became bored with what the city had to offer in the 1980s, so he leased an old pub and created a weekend joint called The Random Club ... He ultimately drove the revitalization of a run-down corridor of the city. Now he has an interest in 12 clubs. Englert’s experience goes to show that leaders must be willing to explore unusual opportunities.

Lee Iacocca may have been 82 years old when his latest book came out in 2007, but he was mad as hell and didn’t care if his friends told him to calm down. “Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening?” asked the former president of Ford and Chrysler. “Where have all the leaders gone?”

Anybody can launch a blog. That’s easy. It’s what you have to say and how you say it that matter. Anita Campbell became a dot-com CEO and now runs a blog at smallbiztrends.com. Because she’s so obsessed with small business news and trends, Campbell didn’t stand around waiting for somebody to hand her a megaphone. Instead, she went out and got one of her own.

As a career option in the late 1800s, the U.S. seed industry stank. Because you can’t look at seeds and tell if they’re good, vendors were notoriously unreliable, selling seeds that were old, of dubious origin, and mixed with stones or weed seed. Into this scenario walked Washington Atlee Burpee, who recognized two things:

He didn’t invent the practice of “platooning” players in baseball, but Casey Stengel honed it to the point that, under his 12-year leadership, the New York Yankees won 10 American League championships and seven World Series. Before Stengel took over the Yankees in 1949, most managers played a set lineup day in and day out.

When author and radio host Garrison Keillor was asked how he had mastered both written and oral storytelling—a critical skill for every leader—he said he hadn’t. “You love the attempt,” he explained ...

What connects Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson and NBA championship coach Phil Jackson? Fair question. Both became experts in their chosen fields and benefited from the teachings of others. They both, in turn, dedicated significant portions of their careers to refining what they learned and then passing those lessons on to others.

Preparing for the unexpected is what allows you to keep a steady hand when guiding your company. Scenarios are a powerful tool to that end. Here's how to use them right:

After a diagnosis, patients at the Mayo Clinic meet with a team of specialists who help them understand what’s happening so they can decide about treatment together, says president and CEO Denis Cortese. This kind of teamwork is the stock-in-trade of Cortese, who won last year’s top leadership award from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership.

You may be using Twitter.com already. If not, it’s worth taking a second look. Why? Because savvy businesses are using the tool to do some of what you do already—smooth out the information flow between leadership and everyone else. Here's how Twitter can help you on the job:

Here are some squibs from our “elected leaders.” For starters: Answer your own phone. Alan Simpson, former U.S. senator from Wyoming, picked up this call in 1980: “Where is that skinny bastard?” “Speaking,” Simpson replied.

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, explores three things you can do to keep your staff motivated and productive:

We all have our blind spots. For a pilot, that spot is the six o’clock position, and it’s the job of a wingman to “check six,” or keep an eye on a pilot’s vulnerable spot. Stretch the metaphor to the workplace, and it’s the leader who could use a wingman, says Air Force fighter pilot Rob “Waldo” Waldman.

Jerry Galison struck gold twice—not by great new ideas or luck alone but because of careful setup and follow-through. Galison/Mudpuppy hit the Inc. 500, an index for fast-growing businesses, in 1989 and the Inc. 5000 two decades later.

When he started out, John Mackey just wanted to make a living selling wholesome food. But the founder of Whole Foods Market had been on a quest for some meaning and purpose in life, and Mackey found them in what he calls becoming a “conscious capitalist”—that is, focusing on purpose rather than profit.

Joseph Plumeri, chairman and chief executive of insurance brokerage Willis Group Holdings, once was a command-and-control leader. “Being too exciting and too motivational is overbearing, and it turns people off,” he says. So he revamped his leadership style to focus on collaboration and debate.

Family-owned businesses don’t get much bigger than Toyota. Yet, both company President Akio Toyoda and his father, honorary Chairman Shoichiro Toyoda, were curiously silent in January and February during the recall of about 8 million cars. It remains to be seen how badly this recall will hurt Toyota’s standing. But the Toyodas’ apparent unwillingness to take the heat sets a poor example.

Here are six ways to guard against “black swan events,” those rare but catastrophic disasters that can take everything down with them, adapted from “The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management.”