Management Stripped Bare 121 leader from heaven expects outperformance. Outperformance is tougher than compliance. The leadership riddle You will never succeed as a leader by trying to be someone else. Trying to be an implausible mix of Genghis Khan, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela and Lord Nelson is a recipe for many hours of therapeutic counselling: it is not a recipe for leadership. But you will never succeed just by being yourself. If you hang around like a teenager in full hormonal angst, waiting for the world to recognize your innate genius and humanity, you will have a very long wait. So we cannot succeed by being someone else, and we cannot succeed just by being ourselves. We may as well give up. The solution is that we have to be the best of who we are. We all have some strengths, and we also have weaknesses which our bosses and colleagues never hesitate to tell us about. So the recipe for leadership success has three ingredients: Focus on your strengths. Corporate evaluation systems focus on weaknesses, which is nonsense. Don't ask Olympic weightlifters to focus on their synchronized swimming skills, which are a bit weak. You only succeed by building on your strengths. Work around your weaknesses. The good news is that leadership is a team sport. You do not have to do it all yourself. So if there are some things you do not enjoy, you will find plenty of people who can fill in for you on accounting, project management, strategy development or whatever fills you with dread. Find your context. Find roles and organizations that play to your strengths. If you hate risk, don't become an entrepreneur or a trader in an investment bank. If you dislike foreign food, don't join a global company. Lies Forget the morality problem. The effectiveness problem is the killer. Most corporate lies get nailed, eventually. It took 30 years to rumble the tobacco