First, the skill of storytelling helps to galvanize your team. Second, the discipline of storytelling requires leaders to be clear about their intentions and to prioritize what fits into the story versus secondary goals and issues. Third, there is possibly an artifact here - great storytellers can make their exploits and achievements sound very exciting and memorable. Successful leaders who are not good storytellers won't get the acknowledgement and appreciation they deserve.

Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, "Here's what I'm going to do" - and you follow him.

Most corporate decisions aren't going to meet the test of high validity. But they're going to be way above the low-validity situations that we worry about.

Rigor is not a substitute for imagination.

If you are committed to the change, you're going to have to sideline the skeptics, or at least keep them under control. There may be a temptation to move them out but skeptics have a value - flagging weaknesses in the plan. Ideally, you will enlist their critical stance by challenging them to find ways to improve the plan as you go forward.

I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.

There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.