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.

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.

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.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information whereas intelligence is one's ability to process information to render good decisions.

The principles that make someone a master in the chief executive role deal with whether or not they can thrive in an environment of ongoing duress, and teach others how to do so.

We frequently hear how essential it is for someone to think "outside the box," but what actually determines one's facility for doing so? In other words, what skills make someone a creative thinker? Typically, creative thinkers can view issues from multiple perspectives, define problems in several different ways, and anticipate likely obstacles. Someone's aptitude for these skills determines how well he or she will perform as a creative thinker.