motivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don't get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.

Trust is perhaps the most critical single building block underlying effectiveness. Without trust leaders do not have followers. Without trust, leaders are impotent despite great rhetoric or splendid ideas. Trust rests on the belief among followers that the leader is transparent: What you see is what there is. Trust means followers believe there is no duplicity; no manipulation just to satisfy the leader's ego. Very simply: The effective leader is transparent; that's why that person is trusted.

When people in organizations feel too secure, it's because there aren't any significant outcomes as a result of what they do. Whatever you do, nothing much different happens. This also means there are no important pay-offs if you risk by innovating. As there are no rewards for taking risks, then there's no sense of push in that institution's culture.

Nothing motivates like success. While academics, consultants and gurus are preoccupied with coming up with great insights and seminal ideas, usually they don't realize that making things happen, achieving operational excellence, moving the organization from uncertainty to clarity, from red ink to black, is what really creates hope for a better future. Therefore, great leadership always involves great ideas and real actions that reinforce a strong belief in the excellence of the decision makers and in the viability of the organization itself.

Self is a construct, a feeling, an identity that is internal and can neither be given nor taken away by others. We develop and nurture that identity by embracing inter-dependence.

Very few people are ambitious in the sense of having a specific image of what they want to achieve. Most people's sights are only toward the next run, the next increment of money.

In organizations where nothing much happens regardless of whether you do something exceptional or just show up in the morning, the best people lose heart and motivation is reduced near the lowest common denominator.