in most important ways, leaders of the future will need the traits and capabilities of leaders throughout history: an eye for change and a steadying hand to provide both vision and reassurance that change can be mastered, a voice that articulates the will of the group and shapes it to constructive ends, and an ability to inspire by force of personality while making others feel empowered to increase and use their own abilities.

A basic truth of management - if not of life - is that nearly everything looks like a failure in the middle.

Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.

The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.

Not everyone in an organization is in a position to accumulate power through competent performance because most people are just carrying out the ordinary and the expected - even if they do it very well. The extent to which a job is routinized fails to give an advantage to anyone doing it because 'success' is seen as inherent in the very establishment of the position and the organization surrounding it. Neither persons nor organizations get 'credit' for doing the mandatory or the expected.

A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.

The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.