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.

The intelligence gap is essentially a shortage of executives with superior thinking skills who are needed by every business, as compared with the number of decision-making positions available.

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.

Business schools need to help students learn how to thrive under pressure. To understand themselves and their psychological vulnerability that might inhibit their ability to be effective in roles that involve ongoing complexity and duress. Preparation is essential.

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.

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

Executive Intelligence is about the specific skills one must have in order to succeed in senior leadership positions, i.e. the ability to evaluate underlying assumptions, recognize the likely emotional reactions of individuals, or sense a misstep and make appropriate adjustments.