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

Encourage reflective backtalk: Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself.

A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.

This is more than just having a vision. You can see the difference in the often-cited way in which Steve Jobs brought in John Sculley to take over Apple. At the time, Sculley was destined to be the head of Pepsico. The clincher came when Jobs asked him, "How many more years of your life do you want to spend making colored water when you can have an opportunity to come here and change the world?"

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.