The message to organizations is this: You have to increase the number of categories of contributing, or the types of career paths, which people can experience as successful. You cannot restrict esteem to the fewer and fewer who will be climbing up the management ladder. You need to have the majority of your people feeling like winners.

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.

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

Real confidence comes from knowing and accepting yourself- your strengths and your limitations -in contrast to depending on affirmation from others.

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.

There are still many women - and their spouses and children - who view a reflected self - I'm Mrs. Smith, not Mary Smith - as psychologically healthy. Those people are not motivated to change. But it is really dangerous to live through others'. What ever your circumstances, it is not a good idea to be wholly dependent on responses from others to like, respect or love yourself. Your children will grow up and start their own families; the divorce rate has remained at 50 percent for decades.