Leadership Lessons: 10 Keys to Success in Life and Business

There are no light bulb moments that strike the unschooled. Great leaders and achievers the masters, innovators, and great ones - do not owe their success to luck, birth, or environment and mindless risk taking. Rather, insight, achievement, and leadership are not the result of happenstance but of self-knowledge, training, and hard work. According to authors Swartz and Thorpe, great achievers throughout history from Michelangelo to Einstein, Madame Curie to Bill Gates, Colonel Sanders to General Eisenhower all have leadership characteristics that can be distilled into 10 key actions for extraordinary success. None of it is easy, the authors say, but following these keys to success can bring substantial rewards in every facet of life. The first keys or actions involve finding great opportunities determining one s passions and distinctive capabilities, the importance of learning, envisioning opportunities, and leveraging opportunities. The second set of actions involves mobilizing support for your ideas by understanding the complexity of and resistance to change, and thee final keys cover how to design, plan, and execute to opportunities while simultaneously developing achievement in others. In the process of exploring what differentiates extraordinary achievers from others, the authors put to rest some long-held and passionately defended notions. Mozart, for example, was not a buffoon who composed some of the world s most beloved music unthinkingly. And Madame Curie was a trained physicist, not just the technician wife of a great man. Michelangelo, arguably one of the greatest artists, engineers, and visionaries in the Western world, is especially interesting; his sculpture of David and the David and Goliath story is a central metaphor for authors: David represents everyone who goes beyond fear, who pursues a higher mission, who puts the interests of others first. David also is an inspiration to us to search for our Davids in the stone or to help other people and organizations see theirs.