I was working with an extraordinarily successful company that was doing a CEO succession, and the board was discussing the threats to the business. They were enormous, despite the company's strong market position. I then realized that there were no longer just turn-around periods for companies in trouble, that now variables that could drastically effect any business's profitability were not going to go away.

Often people freeze under severe pressure, but that says nothing about their ultimate capability- only their level of preparation.

We never ask candidates to demonstrate their skill. We ask lots of questions about past experience, but simply looking at the results of their decisions does not let us understand the process that they used to make the choice in the first place. A good analogy is sports. If you wanted to know how well a person plays basketball, for example, you could look at statistics like shooting percentage or blocked shots. But, this is just an historical account of how well the individual played in the past - the numbers do not tell us much about how that individual plays basketball now.

Leadership means realizing potential-in yourself and in the people you lead.... The leader and followers cocreate their identities and performance.

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.

Very little attention is paid to improving the decision-making skills of both individual executives and the organizational benchstrength as a whole. Often we find that this is overlooked because there is a common assumption the business executives have all the requisite cognitive skills they need when they come to work for the organization. The problem with that perspective is that it overlooks the fact that thinking skills can be learned and improved at any time during the course of a persons lifetime.

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.