Leadership Skills

When an executive team held a strategic planning meeting and considered options, the company founder jumped up and proclaimed their ideas worthless: “The only people in this room that aren’t idiots are the engineers who graduated from Carnegie Mellon and Caltech.” That left out more than half the team.

David Ben-Gurion, founding father and first prime minister of Israel, based his leadership on prioritization. He did this for two reasons: He thought that adhering strictly to priorities was the right way to lead, and he believed the complexities of working in a coalition dictated that you couldn’t deal with even two things at once.

Nobody argues the fact that Robert McNamara was a genius. The Ford Motor Co. whiz kid who led the Pentagon into the Vietnam War, and the World Bank into unprecedented expansion, solved problems with sheer brains. But McNamara’s flaw may have been that, in a larger sense, he just didn’t “get it.”

Gauge your audience: When addressing a crowd you don’t know, quickly assess their immersion in your subject ... Distinguish style from substance ... Find a winning strategy.

In a sample group of 65 CEOs, executives spent 18 hours of a 55-hour work­­week in meetings, plus three hours in phone calls and five hours in business meals. For this lot, working in solitary mode averaged just six hours weekly. CEOs say they wish they had more solo thinking time to ponder strategy ...

Anne Stevens was the first board member at Lockheed Martin who took a flight in an F-16 with the chief test pilot. “I actually took control of the plane, did loops and rolls, and then the pilot pulled nine Gs," she says. "I was the only woman he was able to pull nine Gs with."

Scientists still don’t know where skills reside in the brain or how to describe what we know. In fact, we’re not consciously aware of the vast majority of steps in how we do what we do every day.

The most persuasive person that August Turak has ever met was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Duke University named Meredith Parker. Their conversation holds the secret to persuasively getting what you want:

First, find your bearings: “What is the first question a sailor asks when he is in trouble?” a sea captain asks. “What he asks is, ‘Where am I?’”

Bill Gates said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” It’s true, says leadership guru John Kotter: High achievers tend to feel content with the status quo.