Today, I have a guest post at thoughtLEADERS. Thanks to Mike Figliuolo for featuring me on his outstanding blog. The stories we’ve been reading these past few weeks about Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s new CEO, and the challenges of reversing a 10+ year slide are downright sad – but not entirely surprising. For a long time [...]

The business world is full of similar examples of company’s unwilling to face reality and get out ahead of a trend. Why? It is human nature. Once a person gets settled in a rhythm, they have a very difficult time convincing themselves that there is a better way to do things.

Courageous leaders know that companies exist to serve shareholders while also being good corporate citizens. They don’t allow social responsibility projects to get out of control and punish shareholders, but they also don’t allow social responsibility to be ignored.

The most fundamental rule of business is to appropriately support and grow the going business, while you independently pursue new initiatives to drive the business further. The second activity should not get in the way of the first. Pepsi violated this rule big time by massively under-supporting it’s beverage business over the past few years. It is reported that PepsiCo needs to spend $580 million more on beverage marketing support in 2012 to be competitive.

There is nothing a leader should fear more than not being trusted. Lack of trust makes leading impossible. How do you lose people’s trust? Easy…you lie, exaggerate the positive and downplay the negative, blame others when problems are your responsibility, and most importantly, you don’t deliver what you promise. Given that list, it is easy to see why Washington DC is not trusted.

In business, what is important is getting things done. In pursuing that simply notion, too often we are not clear about the real goal, or even worse, we have several. Lots of things are going on and everyone complains about being busy but in the end, the status quo remains. Strong leaders know how to focus; they make it vividly clear what the goal is and what final achievement of that goal looks like.

Successful leaders have laser-like focus on priorities. Ongoing responsibilities are carried out as efficiently as possible, leaving time to focus on the one or two change efforts designed to significantly improve things. To achieve this, you can’t be a slave to gadgets.

The great leader is typically very enthusiastic but also quite skeptical when things don’t make sense or numbers don’t match points of view, plans or specific objectives.

Did you ever have a boss you just couldn’t please? Pretty soon you start doubting your approaches, and often walk away from your strengths in an effort to guess what will be acceptable. Conversely, it is great to have a boss that you know inherently trusts you and believes you can do great work. You tend to trust your instincts, seize opportunities, and go the extra mile, causing your performance to be much better in that environment.

The Samsung Galaxy S II, which I have fallen in love with, is equivalent to having in my pocket a powerful pc driven by a dual-core processor, an iPod, an e-book reader, a high-definition video recorder, a phone, and a small high-definition tv!