While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.

Manage the dream: Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.

Encourage dissent: Leaders should have associates who have contrary views, who are devil's advocates, "variance sensors" who can tell them the difference between what is expected and what is really happening, between what they want to hear and what they need to hear. There are too many naked emperors running around today.

What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.

The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership.

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.