Leadership is not about sitting and presiding, it's about a going somewhere. To be buoyant, you must not only ignite passion around a common quest, you must also mobilize your team to take a journey with you toward a common destination, or what I call a "real ambition."

As I was coming up in business, screwing up was not an option in any form.

Buoyant leadership is not a management technique, it's a leadership principle based on the belief that leading isn't presiding, it's taking people on a journey, and on any hero's journey there will be a setback.

All buoyant leaders are driven by a real ambition- that is, what is being created that didn't exist before- and one criteria for that real ambition, is that on initial inspection, it seems fundamentally impossible.

The secret is to be prepared, to draw on the strengths of the people around you, and most importantly, to instill confidence that your team will step up and find a solution.

It is so easy to "calibrate" -that is, given the pressures on a smaller company to redefine in less ambitious terms- that which you are in business to accomplish. The moment this happens the downward spiral begins.

Change management is kind of a weird concept to me. We can' t control events any more than we can control the weather. But we control how we deal with it and we can control the opportunities that these moments of change create.