Recognize and respect mutual self-interests, then build creative collaborations to serve them.

That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

Expect the best from your people and they will usually deliver but your expectations must be realistic.

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.

Walt Disney, of all people, did a good job of describing his own netony. "People who have worked with me say I am 'innocence in action,'" he wrote. "They say I have the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder."

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.