The development and/or revelation of a CEO's potential for great leadership requires slow escalations of experiences that involve pressure, each time given the tools to succeed. Successful experience breeds confidence, as well as an eventual restlessness to try more.

Once an individual is given a taste of the gratification that comes from triumph, and the tools to bring it about, they will spend a lifetime in its ongoing pursuit.

CEOs must master three essential attributes, realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos. One's capacity in each determines their ability to cope with today's business environment.

Only recently have we begun to understand the specific cognitive skills that contribute to business success and how to measure them. Hopefully, this insight will allow us to more keenly focus our attention on indentifying and cultivating decision-making abilities in the executive population.

We often say that someone has exceptional political or social savvy, but what specific cognitive skills allow these people to handle interpersonal situations so effectively? Typically, socially skilled people are exceptional at recognizing underlying agendas, anticipating the probable effects and likely unintended consequences of a chosen course of action. These specific capabilities determine one's "people smarts."

In a business setting, one's intelligence is crucial. Many problems faced by today's executives are unique and ill-defined. So, one's ability to analyze information and render a decision based upon the probability of success is imperative. What it comes down to is that all the knowledge in the world is useless if one has no means of processing and applying it. Organizations run on the brainpower of their people.

Those who have high business acumen display specific, identifiable cognitive skills that permit them to perform better than their peers. Once we understand that street smarts is skill-based, we can measure it, compare it, and improve it in the general population.