6) Great Leaders Stick Their Necks Out It is a natural human trait to fear being evaluated. We crave wiggle room so we can deflect blame and get off the hook when things go wrong. In business what is often passed off as a collaborative effort is actually just an attempt to avoid individual accountability. Great leaders want to be measured and evaluated. They continually look for ways to measure things that may seem immeasurable, and they cheerfully accept the blame when things go wrong or they fail to deliver. The old adage that success has a 1000 fathers while failure is an orphan does not apply to great leadership.

7) Great Leaders Believe in Themselves While great leaders crave advice, options, and strong colleagues, they all share a profound belief in themselves and their judgment. Mobley described great leaders as “people stubbornly following their star who don’t know how to quit.” Holding this stubbornness in tension with a willingness to be wrong is perhaps the greatest trick that every great leader must perform.

8) Great Leaders are Deep Thinkers Managers get things done. Executives must decide on the things worth doing in the first place. Though very difficult to quantify, great leaders are deep thinkers. They constantly dive below surface “facts” searching for new ways to knit those facts together. Great leaders are generalists not specialists driven by an omnivorous curiosity. They know that the answers they are seeking will probably emerge from outside business and from disciplines that may seem utterly unrelated.

9) Great Leaders are Ruthlessly Honest with Themselves Self-knowledge is perhaps the most critical trait that all great leaders share. Leaders question assumptions and disrupt complacency by relentlessly asking the question: “What is the business of the business?” This exercise develops and refines the organization’s mission and purpose, and it is little more than the age old question “Who am I?” applied collectively. If you are not clear about the purpose of your own life how can you provide a sense of organizational purpose for others?

10) Great Leaders are Passionate. They may be loudly charismatic or quietly intense, but all great leaders care deeply about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Perhaps most importantly they care about people. Every business is a people business, and passionately caring about people whether they are employees, customers, vendors or stockholders is an essential leadership value.

Once Mobley compiled his list, he was faced with another even more difficult problem: How do you instill values and transform attitudes? He discovered that unlike supervisors and middle managers, executives shared another trait: They were constitutionally untrainable and reacted with hostility to any effort to “brainwash” them with “training.” Worse, Mobley discovered that values and attitudes are not only impervious to typical training techniques, but hectoring people to change often had the unintended consequence of hardening existing attitudes instead.

As the result some deep thinking of his own, Mobley eventually realized that what was needed was “a revolution in consciousness” rather than the kind of step by step curriculum that leads to a single “right answer.” Taking a leap of faith, he decided that the values and attitudes he was looking for could only be brought about as a side benefit or unintended consequence of what almost might be termed “spiritual work.” Rather than converging on a super set of skills, the IBM Executive School fostered the divergence that values uniqueness and individual authenticity.

The risk of failure was real, but if Mobley was going to produce people willing to stick out their necks he had to stick out his own first. He abandoned lectures and books in favor of games, simulations and other experiential techniques designed, not to “train” but to “blow people’s minds.”

As for the personal accountability and measuring results, Mobley’s record speaks for itself. He ran the IBM Executive School from 1956-1966. It was his students that turned IBM into the fastest growing and most admired corporation in the world in the 1960s and 70s…

Follow August Turak on Forbes.com http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/, on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or his website http://www.augustturak.com/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

I am at the end of my rope. I am nauseated by life; it is insipid, without salt and meaning. If I were hungrier than Pierrot I would not choose to eat the explanations people offer. One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world, it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager? I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint? - Soren Kierkegaard

“I’ve spent my life tryin’ to get a line on people and I still can’t figure it,” the zen master said, as if talking to himself. “Man is an isthmus between two oblivions. There’s billions of years before he’s born, and there’s billions of years after he’s dead. Each human being’s a chess piece wedged between these two oblivions. Yet people are forever telling me they don’t have time to dope it all out. They don’t have time to find out what god or devil’s runnin’ this damn game of life by what rules and to what purpose.”

It was late on a cold November afternoon in 1972, and I was sitting at the table in his kitchen in Benwood, West Virginia, drinking myself half-crazy with tea and waiting. I did that a lot. I was twenty years old, he was my first spiritual teacher, I was his first student, and I spent a lot of time just hanging around hoping he’d raise the dead and terrified he just might. He was not only a self-taught spiritual teacher, poet, family man, and violin player, but a bonafide West Virginia hillbilly from just outside of Wheeling.

Several years earlier, he “let the air out” of one of the local hell raisers in a melee he always described as “the shoot-out.” A reporter, sent for an interview, described him as a “short, bald, and powerfully built man in his early fifties, with a round face, piercing blue eyes, and a determined looking aspect that seemed constantly in search of a brick wall through which to ram his cannonball-like head.”

The reporter went on to say he found my Zen master, “sitting in a chair on the front porch of his old farmhouse, guarded by a pair of dangerous looking old refrigerators, in hand-patched leather dress shoes that didn’t match, with one pant leg rolled up higher than the other, drinking coffee from a mason jar.”

My Zen master admitted in the retelling that the depiction was by and large accurate. Except for the refrigerators. “I had him buffaloed,” he would say with mock seriousness and genuine glee. “Those refrigerators were beyond repair. My guards had long since moved on to the spirit world. They weren’t dangerous enough to push a dead man off an outhouse.” However, he also made no bones as to how he felt about “what that son of a bitch reporter was implying.”

For a goodly portion of that November afternoon, he sat across from me at the table, seemingly oblivious to my presence, his “store-bought” reading glasses perched on his broad nose as he pored over the used car ads in the Green Tab as if they were sacred scripture. The Green Tab was one of those local bartering sheets that always depressed the hell out of me as I wondered what it was like to sit hopefully by the phone servicing an ad for a three-dollar “almost new” shower curtain. At the time, and from what I could tell, his main line of work was buying used cars he called “junkers” for $300 and re-selling them for $400.

Occasionally he would get lucky and buy a used school bus. He would strip the tires, wheels, and undercarriage for re-sale and perch the shell up on blocks out at his farm for additional storage capacity. He saved everything, even his left over cooking grease for handmade hand soap, and like every West Virginian I ever knew, his appetite for storage was inexhaustible.

Finally, he took off his glasses, stood up, grabbed his white-painted steel cup which had been designed for something else, and headed for the stove in search of another helping of his self-brewed coffee that he unfailingly described as “gasoline” and which he swore up and down was killing him by inches. It was in mid-stride that he commented, seemingly to no one, on isthmuses, oblivions, gods, games, and devils.

He carried his coffee back to the table, sat down, and proceeded to lard it with his two customary heaping teaspoons of sugar. He was reaching for his glasses again when I realized I’d been extended an invitation and grabbed it.

“I think people are just scared. They’re afraid we can’t know anything for sure so why get started on a hopeless task.”

“Do you know that for sure?” he said, neatly switching pronouns and reading my mind. “Because if you’re sure you can’t know anything for sure then you’re sure about one thing. And if you’re sure about one thing then maybe you can be sure about two, and if two is possible then it stands to reason that maybe, just maybe, you can be sure about everything. The agony of life is uncertainty and the rationalization is that uncertainty is certain. What people really want is the Truth. Something you can take to the bank. Something that won’t crap out on you when you’re up against it like the wet bottoms to fifty-pound paper feedbags when you got starving cattle on your hands. When you’re dyin’ for instance.”

“If everyone wants the Truth what’s holding them back?”

“The simple fact that they don’t want the truth,” he said. He paused long enough to grin at the bewilderment spreading over my face. “They’re scared all right, you got that much right. But what they’re scared of is not the impossibility of finding the Truth — that’s the excuse — but the possibility that they will find it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They want the truth as long as it turns out to be what they want and flatters their ego. Truth is a wonderful thing, at the end of the road it’s the only thing, but it don’t work that way. What they’re scared of is all the small ‘t’ truths they’ll have to face along the way to capital ‘T’ Truth.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“OK. Let’s say me and you was to take a notion and go out to the farm and build a contraption that will tell all the men in this country once and for all whether their wives love them or not. I’m talkin’ real love here, the genuine article. So much of what people call love is like a whore on Sundays — selfishness all dressed up and made respectable courtesy of self-deception. Then we haul our gizmo down and offer our services at a nickel a shot. We’d be out of business in no time.

What we’d do is paralyze them. They’d be dying to know and terrified to find out. Checkmate. The human pawn wedged again between the irresistible force of their desire for truth, and the immovable object of what it might turn out to be. So they’d rush off to the bar and the football game hoping the whole damn problem will just go away while their back’s turned. If you turn your back and hope it goes away enough, it becomes a habit. Eventually that’s what you become, that’s who you are. You become Untruth.

That’s what conversion is all about. The word ‘conversion’ comes from the Latin for ‘turn back.’ It’s a clockwise process of continually turning into the truth instead of away from it, and you do this turning one tough decision at a time. Most folks is living their lives counterclockwise the way I see it. ”

He reached for one of the sweet rolls he bought day old and four dozen at a time. “Think about it,” he said, munching away. “It’s all around you. There’s a million people out there right now who know they should see a doctor but are scared to make an appointment. A million wives who want to know where their husbands were last night but are so afraid to ask they pretend they don’t. And you’re surprised there’s billions of people who want to invite God into their home but are afraid of the mess he’d find?

The Truth will set you free but it ain’t your truth. You got to want it for its own sake and damn the consequences. Most of humanity just doesn’t have the stomach for that kind of trip.”

Pausing and without explanation, he got up and sifted inconclusively around the room for a minute or so, then opened the door and vanished down his dark, unheated hallway, only to re-emerge carrying the biggest ring of keys I have ever seen. I was astonished both by its magnitude and the memory such an assortment of unmarked keys required. However, it also seemed vaguely appropriate that a man who had spent his life unlocking the secrets of the universe would own just such a set of keys.

Sitting back down he shuffled through the members of this club until he came to a long, narrow, old-fashioned skeleton key that he patiently and deliberately removed from its large brass ring. As I tried to imagine what “key” to the human predicament, the universe, or me he was about to illustrate, he inserted the skeleton end into the canal of his right ear and began scratching vigorously while picking up just where he left off.

“It all comes down to this. You can either huddle in the cave of illusion and wishful thinking or start tunneling out. You can either live and die like a dog, or set yourself to finding out why dogs live and die. People are forever saying that they’re afraid of wasting their lives on such a project. That’s utter bullshit. They don’t know who they are, where they came from, or where they’re going when they die. They settle for a lick and a promise in hopes the guy on the white horse will pull up on their deathbeds.

They scatter precious life force to the four winds vainly trying on one distraction after another. They try on distractions like new suits of clothes, forever hoping their latest little pleasure will somehow turn the trick and either fill that empty hole deep in their guts or help them forget it’s there.

They never slow down long enough to realize the empty spot they’re tryin’ to forget is precious. It’s Truth trying to get their damn fool attention. As for filling that hole, they have about as much chance of filling up that cavity with the produce of Mother Earth as an oyster has of dislodging a grain of sand inside its shell by wrapping it with pearl. It only makes the irritation worse.

By the time they hit forty they’re burnt out, dead tired, and it’s beginning to dawn on them that Death has ‘em in his cross-hairs. By now they’re finding it damn hard to believe anything will turn the trick. So they settle for drowning out the background noise of nameless regret with booze, blaring televisions, and hoping against hope that their children don’t end up like them. Even if they turn to religion they don’t want the Truth. They want reassurance, a magic word, nostrum, or Sunday emotion that will mask full time pain with part-time effort. They’re still not willing to consider that Truth might be calling from deep inside that pain. They’re still not ready to face it, to face themselves, to change.

Freud was an atheist but he had one thing right. He said most folks don’t live, they are merely lived. They’re lived by their passions, fears, and rationalizations and they call that living. The way I look at it, that ain’t living. It’s death propped up in a chair.”

Suddenly, he seemed to catch himself, he glanced at the wall clock which read 5:15, muttered “damn” under his breath, and lurched across the room to his ancient coat hanger adorned, black and white television precariously perched on the counter. He flicked it on, turned off the sound, and returned to his chair. He always the gambler, was betting once again that by the time the local news came on at six that broken down tube would be warm enough to produce a picture.

While otherworldly in so many ways, He was keenly interested in what was going on locally, even to the point of occasionally strolling up to a nearby bar just to sip a Coke and load up on gossip. The only television I ever saw him watch was the six o’clock news, and the only compensation for his guidance he would ever accept was the occasional copy of the Wheeling Intelligencer I pretended to buy for myself.

As for me, I needed the respite that fickle television had just afforded. Once again, this Zen master had hit every button and left my head spinning as I tried to fight off his uncanny knack for launching into general rants that ended up hitting me so damn personally. What made him particularly effective was the utterly flat, emotionless way that he delivered these tirades. I was angry at his depressing analysis or maybe just angry with him for making me so depressed. Could things really be that bleak?

As these clouds cleared and the room came back into focus, I noticed that he was staring at me and had been for the last few moments. As I squirmed, his bright, blue eyes began to twinkle, “I know, I know,” he began in perfect seriousness except for those eyes. “I’m a mean and terrible man who can’t wait for quittin’ time so I can get back to pushing all the baby ducks I can find backwards in the water.”

With this his lips began to twitch and giving it up as a bad job he burst into one of his fits of hysterical laughter that always left him doubled over with crisscrossed arms holding onto his rounded belly, apparently for all of dear life. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t resist the bastard. The next thing I knew we were goading each other into spiraling round robin outbursts of laughter until we were merely laughing at each other laughing at each other as the tears ran down our cheeks.

No matter how serious things ever got my Zen master and I always found or created hundreds of excuses for these laughing fits. He was even fond of telling people that these episodes were the real reason I hung around. But as he shook his head in mock disappointment, his twinkling eyes were always on mine, and I will never forget the deep affection those eyes conveyed.

“Well, well,” my slowly recovering Zen master finally said, eyes still a twinkle. “A few randomly tossed bricks hit a few carefully guarded stained glass windows, I reckon. Can’t you see that I have to give you a headache if I want to sell you my aspirin?”

“What are you selling, sir?” I said, still thinking he was kidding around.

“I come to you as a man selling air,

And you will think twice at the offer and price,
And you will argue that nothing is there,
Although we know that it is – everywhere.”

He tossed off these improvised lines so quickly and spontaneously — as if we’d been rehearsing this skit forever — that I was stunned. But he didn’t seem to notice. He hesitated, his face softened, and no longer looking at me, his eyes took on a deep, blue, dreamy cast.

“Wonderful things…” he finally whispered after a long pause and with deep emotion. “Wonderful things… I want to sell you wonderful things.” Then his eyes glazed over altogether, and he was far away.

“You know I was in Egypt once,” he said softly after a few moments. “They told me some guy named Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb still sealed. Well, he chiseled a head and shoulders sized hole in that seal deep underground. Then he shoved in a lantern, stuck in his head and froze. The fellow behind him couldn’t take it and got to screaming, ‘What do you see? For God’s sake man what do you see?’ Carter didn’t move a muscle, but his answer wafted out and echoed back through that tomb like a voice from the other side. ‘I see wonderful things.’”

Again he hesitated. Then, turning to me, he said, “The simple fact is I’ve seen wonderful things. Things I can’t convey in words and things you can’t imagine. And I’m so damn grateful that the only reason I’m still draggin’ this slowly rotting carcass of mine around is on the off chance that you and maybe a few like you might through my help and the grace of God see those wonderful things too.”

His eyes were again filled with tears but this time of a different sort, and a realization welled up in me from the deepest part of my being. It welled up in wave after wave until the lump in my throat was so big I could scarcely breathe. I wanted to see these wonderful things he was selling. I wanted these wonderful things more than I had wanted or ever would want anything in my entire life. Even if it killed me.

Suddenly, the mood shifted again, and so help me God something luminous appeared on his face. Here was a different man or, perhaps, a vessel for something more than man, and when I realized the direction my mind was taking I was terrified. The tension was so intense that all I wanted to do was let go and cry my heart out. Yet something was holding me back. I hadn’t cried in ten years, and I wasn’t going to do so now. Instead, like a Hebrew in the desert, I mentally cried out for Moses to veil his face.

This second realization, so opposite and hard on the heels of the first, stunned me even more. I clenched my teeth, focused my attention on the teacup I was strangling in my hands, and fought like a tiger to regain control.

I can’t say how much time went by, but gradually I regained my precious composure and lifted my eyes. A normal man was still sitting across from me, his eyes focused on his short stubby fingers loosely interlocked in his lap. He was just sitting — that artless, effortless kind of sitting that is the achievement of a lifetime and impossible to fake.

Finally, summoning all my courage, I whispered. “What do I need to know? What do I have to do?”

“OK,” he said blandly. “Here it is. First I’ll give you the facts and then the formula. Ready? There is a God or Absolute Truth, and he knows what he’s doing. And there’s a little piece of him in you, and your job and reason for being here is to bring that to the surface and become it. It’s like the difference between potential electricity and actual. Faith is the potential and realization the actual. I call the realization Enlightenment, but every religion’s got its own name for it or for that matter you can make up your own — it don’t matter. But when God gets you by the hair you’ll know it. That much I promise. It’ll take you to your knees, it’s that drastic, but that’s OK because you’ll be just where you need to be to start sayin’ thanks. And if you spend the rest of your life in that position you’ll still feel like you never got started. And from that need to say thanks will come an overwhelming need to help a world that first and foremost don’t want your definition of help. But you’ll try anyway even if they kill you for it.

But here’s the catch. Like I keep saying, always remember that I’m just a bald headed bastard from West Virginia with one pant leg rolled up higher than the other drinking coffee from a mason jar. You can’t take my word for it, or anyone else’s for that matter. You got to take the trip yourself. Sure, maybe I got some pointers for you that will keep you from spinnin’ your wheels on the way up the mountain, and if a hillbilly like me appeals to your intuition, I might inspire you to throw your shoulder a little harder at the door. But there’s no substitute for climbing up that mountain yourself and taking a look around.

In this business, second hand information is worse than none. There’s always the chance you’ll sit down on another man’s word and call it faith. Hell, that ain’t faith; that’s belief. Faith ain’t in words and concepts, faith’s what gets you climbing and keeps you climbing. And, hell, you really don’t even need much of that to get started. All you need from the get go is the faith that you can be a little less stupid about life than you already are and take it from there.

Now, here’s the formula. It’s simple to say and hard to do. You got to attack the gates of heaven with everything you have. You got to go after it hammer and tongs like your hair was on fire. Spiritual work by definition is anything that increases your addiction to Truth and lessens your addictions to anything else. Face all those little truths along the way no matter where they lead. Attack those heavenly gates with an axe or anything else handy to the job. But here’s the catch,” and he smiled. He smiled the only really beatific smile I’ve ever seen. “You will fail.”

“You’ll fail because those gates don’t swing in they only swing out, and you can’t force your way in — you’re only invited. You need some help from the other side because ultimately, you can’t do it alone. But in your defeat you will surrender, and with your total surrender the doors magically swing open. Mystics call it the Magnificent Defeat.

But don’t get any ideas. You can’t just decide to surrender goin’ in and skip all the work. You have to go through it. You got to transcend work not skip it. We don’t consciously surrender. It happens to us when we’re fought out in the most noble cause there is. It happens to us when we realize, once and for all, the utter futility in trying to boot strap ourselves into heaven. You gotta be like a stage actor. He has to work like hell, maybe for years, just to finally be able to let go and act natural.”

“All human beings want the Truth,” he continued. “The degree of difference between them is whether they realize it, how much energy they put into it, and how systematically they apply that energy. As above so below. It ain’t all that much different from startin’ a business. You make a commitment, learn everything you can on the subject, surround yourself with the best like-minded people you can find, burn your bridges behind you, and stop at nothing short of evil to get there. This business called spirituality has only one product but it comes in three colors — service to others, selflessness, and the longing for That Which IS.

“Does you’re product guarantee results, sir? Will I make the top of the mountain? Does it come with a money back guarantee?” I said, trying to hide my anxiety behind levity.

“I guarantee nothing concerning Enlightenment,” he said flatly yet vehemently. “What I neglected to tell you is all the other million and one parts to this formula that ain’t no formula. Let’s lump ‘em all together and call ‘em grace. What I know and you gotta find out is this: This is God’s sand box, and in the end he’s calling ALL the shots. Believe me, I have no standing with the man upstairs. Hell, for all we know maybe we don’t seek grace, but only seek because we’re graced.

All we do is what every businessman does. Play the odds. We work like hell to increase probabilities. But even the businessman needs grace to turn probabilities into success. He just calls it luck. But they’ll all tell you the harder they work the luckier they get. You might say the whole damn spiritual path is nothing more than learning how to let grace happen. It’s learning the habit of becoming accident-prone.

But I will guarantee this. Either way, you’ll know you’ve spent your life a hell of a lot less foolishly than you would otherwise. You’ll know your shoulder has been to the wheel of the most noble undertaking there is. And if you stick to it, this work will transform that guy you see in the shaving mirror into a good, decent, honest, compassionate human being who can make good decisions, see them through, and damn the consequences. In other words it’ll make a man out of you, and that ain’t too shabby.”

Then his voice softened again.

“But when you get tired and discouraged and start feeling sorry for yourself, try to remember one thing. If you think you are working hard to find God, you have no idea how hard God is working to find you.”

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

I was 21 years old. And for the first and only time in my life, I was sure I was about to die. I was in the passenger seat of my 1963 day-glo green Ford Econoline van with a bubble-shaped skylight on the roof and a madman behind the wheel – a West Virginia hillbilly who happened to be my Zen Master. We had been on our way out West when he’d gotten news that his son was in trouble back in Wheeling, and now he was barreling home with me in tow to do what he could.

The trip had started out two days before on an almost comical note. On a cold dark morning at 5:30, his usual starting time, I was coming up his front steps to pick him up. My van was parked across the street and according to his careful instructions, was full of enough tools, extra tires, and spare parts to rebuild it on the fly if necessary. And because of the Arab oil embargo that year, it was stocked with fifteen gallons of spare gasoline in three five-gallon cans.

Before I could knock, a shadowy apparition, backlit by the hallway light, burst through the door. He obviously had about five layers of clothes on over his short, stocky body. On his head was one of those ridiculous fur-lined black vinyl hats with a fur-lined bill that fastens to the front. The chin straps, which no one who owns one of those hats ever seems to snap, hung loosely to his shoulders, and in his hands were two rope-handled paper bags with enough turkey drumsticks, hard boiled eggs, and bananas to feed us both for a year. This menu was his way of saving time and avoiding restaurant expenses on the road. But what really caught my attention were his outlandish calf-high boots which I am convinced were one of a kind, and which are beyond my powers to describe.

Sensing the question behind my slack-jawed look, his blue eyes lit up with a twinkle. “Yeah,” he said, “I got my mukluks on and I’m ready. I’ve rid’ these stage coaches before. That van of yours has no heat, no seat belts, and it drives like a greased pig. But I reckon I’m more than a match for it. Give me ten square feet to land on and I’ll bring you home OK.”

Blind faith

I was about to find out if he was as good as his promise. On that black, bitterly cold night we were racing home in white-out conditions down the mountainous section of Interstate 70 just before it reaches Wheeling, West Virginia. There were several inches of icy snow on the road already, and he was going way too fast for me and that rickety old van. He had the little 170-cubic-inch engine (which some engineer had decided belonged under a thin metal cover between the seats) wound up so tight I couldn’t hear myself think. Everywhere I looked I saw only imminent disaster.

The windshield wipers barely worked under normal conditions; if the blades had ever been replaced it hadn’t been by me. All I could see in front of us was the fuzzy red glare of what I guessed were tail lights swirling around even faster than the snow. The wind, gusting continually, was pushing us all over the road. Then with a loud shloomp a huge clump of slushy snow splattered the windshield.

Involuntarily recoiling, I jerked my head toward my passenger-side window and found myself staring straight into the wheel hub of a tractor trailer. It was intent on passing in the right-hand lane and was busily spewing wet snow onto my windshield in the process. The wheel was getting closer and closer. Hypnotized with terror, I just watched it inch up.

With a whoosh the truck’s back draft hit, bucking the unstable van left toward the face of the mountain. Looming huge in the headlights, the mountain seemed to lean over, ready to grab us.

In a panic I ratcheted my head toward my driver. He was desperately working the wheel and trying to turn us out of the slide and into the truck’s draft all at once. I’d purchased the van from the phone company. It had a broken frame, and though I’d had it welded, now the front didn’t quite line up with the back. Worse, the steering linkage was old and tired, leaving the wheel with way too much play in it.

This, combined with the snow, the wind, the truck’s buffeting, the nonexistent visibility, had my Zen Master frantically whirling the wheel first one way and then the other faster and faster, like some cartoon character steering a storm tossed ship. The only thing needed to complete the scene would be the wheel coming off in his hands.

He finally pulled us out of the slide, but was now relying only on the steady push of the truck’s draft to keep us from sliding under its wheels. All I could think was: What the hell are we doing in the passing lane? My God, why doesn’t he just slow down and let the damn truck pass? But slowing down just wasn’t in his nature. I was struck by the bat-out-of hell determination etched into his face. It was a face that had made a habit of staring down life and had gotten to like it. If most of us are like candles, this guy was a laser.

My driver never looked back. At that moment, the expression on his face and his purposeful glow seemed to light up the van. With his seat pulled so far forward that he loomed over the steering wheel, that small man looked large.

After what seemed like an eternity, the truck finally passed, and the vacuum this created literally picked the van up and sucked it toward the cliff on our right. Somehow we didn’t go over but instead reverted to wobbling along at what passed for normal in that crazy van on that crazy night.

Moment of truth

That’s when I snapped. I was scared stiff and an hour or so of this was all I could take. Trying unsuccessfully to catch my breath, I heard a voice in my head screaming, How did I get into this mess? What was I thinking? Who is this guy? This can’t be happening. Then I heard the gasoline sloshing around in the cans behind my seat and decided I had to make my move before the next tractor trailer bore down on us.

“Don’t you think we ought to cool it?” I said, shocked by the contrast between my firm intentions and the plaintive plea squeaking from my constricted throat.

“What?” he shouted over the whining motor.

“Don’t you think we ought to cool it?” I repeated loud enough for him to hear me, then glanced furtively in his direction.

I was about to mention the gasoline, but his face, contorted with effort and concentration, swung around and fixed me with those amazing blue eyes. An instant later, all the tension drained from his face. It moved from amusement to a grin that grew wider and wider until all five layers of clothing, goofy hat and mukluks began shaking with laughter.

“What’s the matter Oogie, scared to die?” He shouted with mock seriousness, unable to stop laughing. “If you are, then ride the roof, my boy, ride the roof! From there you can jump off any time you want. You told me you wanted adventure. Here I am riskin’ my neck to deliver, and you’re busy pumpin’ Hail Marys out one end so you don’t make a mess at the other. I know how it is. This Zen stuff’s fine for a sunny day, but when things get tight, call in the cavalry.” He went off into another fit of laughter.

The little blood I had left in my extremities went rushing to my head. I had been saying Hail Marys, but when I’d started and how many I’d said I couldn’t say. In fact if he hadn’t mentioned it…but how did he know? Had I been praying aloud? But the noise… we were shouting just to be heard, and it was too dark to read lips.

When I recovered a bit, I noticed something had changed. He was still a whirling blur at the wheel, but when he looked over, he had the look of someone genuinely concerned.

“Listen,” he finally said in a voice so soft it was almost feminine. So soft, in fact, that amidst all the noise I wonder to this day if he actually spoke or just projected his thoughts into my head.

“Everything’s all right. Everything’s got a purpose and everyone a destiny. I don’t know exactly how things between me and you are supposed to play out, but I do know this: They ain’t going to play out tonight. You’ll see. We’ll be home soon. Everything is all right.”

It was as if an invisible hand reached out, stroked me gently, and pushed me back into my seat. I took the first real breath in what seemed like days and closed my eyes. I noticed with fascination that my racing pulse returned to normal without my help. In that moment I wouldn’t have traded my seat on that 1963 Ford starship with anyone. The next thing I knew we were pulling up to his house, back in Wheeling, safe and sound.

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

Anonymous

This M.I. T study on nonverbal communication has a lot to teach about business. So much that, as the article says, “We ignore these ancient signals at our own peril.” Whether we realize it or not, everything we do or don’t do is freighted with nonverbal signals that others are straining to decipher. Whether consciously or unconsciously, experience teaches us all that verbal communication is just as likely to conceal as it is to reveal. Information is infinite and time is very finite. We are all looking for little poker “tells” that will give us an accurate appraisal of another’s character and motivations in the shortest amount of time. A first date is a great example. Both parties strive to be “at their best” while simultaneously looking for the “tells” that determine whether a second date makes sense.

Throughout my career I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. I realized long ago that making a successful hire means successfully reading the unspoken tea leaves of the person being interviewed and successfully managing my own.

For example, not only is the content of a question important but the order in which it is asked. Ordering signals priority, and while a question concerning retirement benefits is perfectly appropriate, a person whose first question is about retirement is probably signaling a security bias as well.

To be fair, perhaps in this example this person is actually not risk adverse but only inadvertently sending a “wrong” or “mixed” signal. But even here there is a signal to be read: the signal of a person who is not very good at managing signals. And a person who is not aware of the signals he is sending may also be signaling shallow thinking or deficient people skills.

Managing our own signals is not necessarily manipulative or inauthentic. As a salesman, my first questions were always about company goals and commissions because I was hoping my prospective employer would accurately “pick up” my signal that I was a team and goal oriented individual.

Managing our nonverbal signals is just an extension of Thoreau’s advice that we should learn to live “deliberately.” Living consciously and deliberately is akin to a company managing its brand, and whether we realize it or not, we are all in the brand building business. There is nothing more important to a company than its brand, and there is nothing more important to our lives—whether personally or professionally –than our personal brand. Whether its products or people, life is little more than a sorting process: we are constantly looking for brands and people we can trust, and there is a tremendous premium in being able to make these decisions accurately without having to do tons of time consuming research.

I remember an article in the Wall Street Journal about the man who turned around the New York subway system. He inherited every conceivable problem that a system in crisis could provide, but the first thing he did was eradicate graffiti from the subway cars. Every time a car came to the end of the line it was repainted and sent back out. Eventually the graffiti artists gave up.

Where some might see a man with his priorities out of whack, I saw pure genius. By eliminating graffiti he was signaling to his employees and customers that things actually were going to change. His victory over graffiti created confidence, lifted employee morale, and built the political capital that made a real structural overhaul possible. As someone who lived in New York in the early 80s and visited recently, the transformation is still wonderful to behold.

As a contrary example, I once inadvertently started a false rumor that company-wide layoffs were looming. Alarmed, I finally tracked down its source. It seems the president and I always met with the door open. So when on one occasion we did close the door, the employees jumped to the conclusion that it meant something serious… like layoffs. After a considerable waste of time I eventually stemmed the tide before resumes flew, but I learned from this incident that a kingdom might very well be lost from something as innocuous as a closed door. Another time I found myself in a hole when I showed up at a Silicon Valley start-up wearing a suit and tie.

The medium is the message and perceptions do matter. When a man forgets his wedding anniversary the uncaring signal he sends is far more damaging and long lasting than a single incident might suggest. Not to mention that he is now out of pocket for twice the roses for significantly less than half the credit. And the same holds true when we forget that one of our people is up for a salary review.

People often lament that following Thoreau’s advice to live deliberately or a monk’s to live “mindfully” sounds like a lot of work. It is, but the amount of work pales to almost insignificance when compared to the alternative: rushing around like the Wicked Witch of the East, scattering signals to the wind, and wondering why houses keep dropping onto our heads.

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

I’m 29 years old and I own two coffee shops and a translation company in Austin, TX. I have been a daily reader of Forbes, Fortune and Businessweek online editions for about 7 years, constantly scooping up the wisdom to be found in their pages.

Up until reading Business Secrets of the Trappists, probably my favorite article I’ve read was this one by Fortune editor Geoff Colvin about the mechanics of people achieving greatness. At the end of the article, the topic turns to what in the hell motivates those who achieve demonstrable greatness to work so hard. Then comes the following paragraph:

“The authors of one study conclude, ‘We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why.’”

Your monks at the Mepkin Abby could probably answer the why question. Your voice is unique in everything I’ve read and, at this point, I’ve read pretty much everything I can find by you. I applaud your work and look forward to your future articles, as they are the only business articles that have brought me to tears : )

Will you have any speaking engagements in Texas in the upcoming months? I would love to attend.

Best Regards,

Ryan McElroy

In 1985 I became VP of Sales for a start-up called Applied Control Systems (ACS) that made PC based inventory and accounting software for restaurants. I soon discovered there that were 25 competitors selling a similar product. Worse, at the time very few mom and pop restaurants had a PC or plans to buy one. This meant a “two step sale.” We had to sell a third party PC just to sell our software. As a result, ACS had very few sales and was rapidly burning through cash.

The solution was NCR Corporation. NCR not only sold PCs, but through its cash register division had a huge sales force and installed base in the food service industry. If NCR’s register division would resell our product,FoodManager, our problems would be solved. Of course, all our competitors realized this as well. We all made the trip to NCR’s headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. We all presented wonderful products only to be told that NCR had no interest in reselling any of our offerings.

An NCR rep summed it up best, “When I sell a PC to a restaurant, I get a fifty dollar commission and a million dollar headache. They load it up with software, they won’t pay for training, things go wrong, and fingers start pointing at me. The agony to revenue ratio just doesn’t make sense.”

But I kept asking questions and eventually discovered that NCR’s computer division was launching a mini-computer called the NCR Tower with a price point of $200,000. Software on the Tower went for $150,000, and FoodManagerwas the only product on the market that could be ported to run on the Tower’s proprietary operating system. Besides, the Tower would only be bought by large restaurant chains. This meant leaving the morass of mom and pop restaurants behind. Maybe the commission on $350,000 sales plus the yearly 20% maintenance fee might bring the agony to revenue ratio back in line for NCR.

But there was a problem. NCR’s computer division had no plans to offer the Tower to the food service industry, and the cash register division folks had never even heard of the Tower and didn’t have permission to sell it even if they had.

It took dozens of phone calls, but I finally got the president of NCR’s computer division on the line. He agreed to a ten minute meeting on a park bench outside NCR’s cafeteria at 6:30 AM. No, I couldn’t buy breakfast. A plane flight toDayton for ten minutes on a bench was the best I could do.

I only had ten minutes but I luckily only had one question: Why was he launching the Tower into vertical markets where the NCR brand meant nothing when NCR already owned the restaurant industry through its cash register business? An hour later I had the phone number of his key lieutenant and a mandate to “look into it.”

Two weeks later I introduced a team of executives from NCR’s computer division to their heretofore unknown colleagues from the cash register division. I showed them the immense size and growth rate of the restaurant industry. Then a slide on how fast the industry was computerizing and another on NCR’s dominate cash register share. I made the case that stand-alone cash registers would eventually be replaced by terminals hanging off a computer: a computer that should be NCR’s Tower.

Then I argued that if NCR didn’t use the Tower to control back office functions like accounting and inventory management, competitors would use the back of the house as a point of entry into NCR’s accounts for their own computers. From here they would eventually win the front of the house register business by replacing NCR’s registers with terminals. On the other hand, NCR could use the same back of the house strategy and the Tower to gradually pick off the registers from competitive installations.

Next, I presented an eye-popping revenue projection of what a joint venture between the two divisions would achieve by leveraging the retail division’s sales force, the computer division’s know-how, and NCR’s dominant brand in the restaurant industry. I then suggested the revenue split between the divisions and provided an org chart for how the retail and computer division’s field forces would work together on Tower opportunities. Then I unveiled a training program and contest funded by our company to kick off the joint venture.
My last slide was our company logo. To which I verbally added, “By the way, this plan will need some software. We provide that.” In a two hour presentation this single sentence was the only time I mentioned our product.

Two months later we signed our first deal with many more to come. Software that we couldn’t give away at $2500 was flying off the shelves at $150,000. And everyone, especially our mutual customers, were absolutely delighted…

*    *    *

In two recent articles here at Forbes, Maximizing Shareholder Value: The Dumbest Idea in the World, and Peggy Noonan on Steve Jobs and Why Big Companies Die, Steve Denning refers to an article by Noonan and her quote aboutSteve Jobs.

He [Steve Jobs] has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM and Xerox, Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

After nodding approvingly to this sideswipe at sales in his first article, Denning felt morally obligated to pour on the opprobrium in his second:

Instead of the company being dominated by salesmen who can pump up the numbers and the accountants who can come up with cuts needed to make the quarterly targets, those who add genuine value to the customer (my italics) have to re-occupy their rightful place.

To put it mildly, I found these anti-sales tirades (I’ll let accountants speak up for themselves) more than passing strange; coming as they do from three people who otherwise argue persuasively for the importance of delighting customers rather than merely hitting financial targets – a people centric, service based corporate value system that I wholeheartedly endorse.

Denning, Jobs, and Noonan quite obviously have very little understanding of the critical role that sales must play in any organization intent on delighting customers let alone how salesmen add value. As I hope my case study above illustrates, great salesmen and great selling cultures don’t shove bad products down the throats of unwitting and unwilling customers. Instead through careful questioning and listening great salesmen use the constant contact they have with customers to uncover what the customer wants and needs and carry this intelligence back to the product development team. It was sales, not ACS’ engineers that brought two of NCR’s divisions together in order to delight customers with a turnkey solution. As for sales adding value, turning the $2500 product originally envisioned by ACS’ product team into a $150,000 product is not a bad start.

Further, the solution that NCR bought, strictly speaking, had very little to do with what Jobs referred to as “knowing the product.” It relied on knowing what the customer wants.  Customers don’t want what Noonan calls “good products.” They want what good products do for them. This critical distinction is caught neatly by the old adage thatIBM doesn’t sell drill bits IBM sells holes.

The key to delighting NCR, and by extension NCR’s end users, was not in knowing our product better than the programmers who wrote it. The key was in strategically knowing NCR’s business: knowing it better perhaps in this case than they knew it themselves. Rather than focus on product, I asked a question right from the Golden Rule: If I were NCR what would I want?  In the spirit of what I refer to as service and selflessness, I ignored my product, commissions, and quarterly revenue goals, and focused instead on NCR’s wants and needs. ACS’ product became just one of several products that together became the means to a much larger end. The revenue ACS eventually garnered was merely the by-product of the much bigger mission of helping NCR delight customers.

Most of ACS’ competitors had “good products.” They were great at what Jobs described as “knowing the product”- they’re demos were dazzling. But they were lousy at knowing what the market wanted: a seamless integration of computer, cash register, and software.  All the so-called products of both NCR and ACS were merely features (drill bits) that created a much larger solution (hole).

Early in my career I made the mistake of turning customer support reps into salesmen precisely because they “knew the product.” It was a disaster. They were so busy talking drill bits that they forgot about the customer’s holes.  They ended up so busy talking to themselves that they failed to notice that the customer had long since left the room.

The error that Denning, Jobs, and Noonan make is buying into the common misapprehension that salesmen are hucksters when huckster is merely a moniker for a horrific salesman. In fact the mission of any sales training worth mentioning is to transform the novice salesman from a peddler into a consultant: a consultant who, yes, Mr. Denning, “adds value,” by providing a “solution” that satisfies his customer’s “felt need.” Peddlers push product. Salesmen realize that products are the means. The end is delighting customers.

Louis R. Mobley, my mentor and the founder of the IBM Executive School in 1956, summed up the ongoing conflict between product guys and sales guys in this way. The product guy argues that since he knows technology and where it’s going the sales guy should just peddle what he’s given to sell. The sales guy argues in turn that since he knows what customers want the product guy should just build what he’s told to build.

Mobley’s answer to these competing viewpoints lay somewhere in the middle, but I find it ironic that the customer centric argument that Mobley ascribes to sales, is exactly the argument that Denning, Jobs, and Noonan ascribe to the product folks. I’ve worked in many tech companies and owned two. For every pump and dump sales rep I’ll show you an arrogant product type determined to force feed customers some over engineered, feature bloated kluge that only a techie can boot up, let alone love.

Of course Jobs is an exception, and it is because I admire the sixth sense he had for delighting customers so much that I find his comments about sales so disheartening. Was it sales that insisted that every PC had to be uniformly boxy, steel gray, and big enough to anchor a boat? Apple didn’t succeed at the expense of sales driven companies, but at the expense of nerdy engineers who ignored user experience and form in favor of features and function.

While Jobs was way too cool ever to admit it, Jobs was foremost a great salesman.  In the beginning Steve Wosniak was the inside “product guy.” Jobs was the outside “sales guy” staying attuned to the customer’s wants and needs: a role he heroically played right to the end. Not to mention the electrifying salesmanship he displayed on stage as Apple’s incomparable pitchman. In his trademark black turtle neck and jeans he didn’t seem like a stereotypical salesman, but this masterful play against type was just what made him such a great one.

As for IBM going south because sales took over, what Jobs failed to recall is thatIBM’s founder, Tom Watson Sr., was a salesman. According to Mobley, he and his son and successor, Tom Watson Jr., worked tirelessly to ensure that IBM’s culture remained a sales culture, and what they meant by the term “sales culture” was always putting the customer first. I would argue (as did Mobley who retired from IBM in 1970) that IBM began to falter in the 70s not because IBM became a sales culture but because it stopped being one.

Of course none of this is meant to imply that product people don’t “add value” even if Denning denies that distinction to sales people. The value they add is critical. Instead I would argue that what Denning, Jobs, and Noonan describe as a “great product” means that everyone, even those damn accountants, must share a value system that puts delighting customers first.

Steve Denning eloquently begins his wonderful overall article on the perils of maximizing shareholder value with an equally wonderful quote from Peter Drucker. “There is  only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” Salesmen have two similar mantras that we like to bandy about over a beer. “There is no business until someone makes a sale,” and “The customer is always right.”

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Successful entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, but they all share one essential trait. Find out how to make your own entrepreneurial dreams come true.

Much to the dismay of my long suffering father, in 1985 I exchanged my “fast track” career in the New York City based cable television industry for a job with a cash-starved, software start-up in bucolic North Carolina for half the pay. Shortly thereafter I attended my first meeting of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development that had recently formed in Research Triangle Park (RTP) to nurture entrepreneurship.

The speaker was a highly successful Silicon Valley transplant with what might be euphemistically described as “a bit of an attitude.” The first thing he did was ask all the entrepreneurs in the capacity crowd to raise their hands. Very few hands went up. Then he smirked, “Oh I get it, the rest of you are wannabes trying to sell something to an entrepreneur.”

He didn’t get much of a laugh but he soldiered on unfazed, “People are always asking me for the difference between Silicon Valley and RTP. Well, in Silicon Valley when someone quits IBM and starts a company everyone says, ‘What took you so long?’ Around here when someone quits IBMto start a company everyone says, ‘What happened, you get fired?’”

My own start-up failed a couple years later, but signing on remains one of the best decisions I ever made. Hell, even my Dad eventually agreed. Years later I was whining about how excruciatingly painful it was bootstrapping my own company. After patiently enduring my five minute sob story all he said was, “Yeah, and you wouldn’t trade places with anyone, would you?”

Much as it galled me to agree with the old man, the stunned look on my face gave it away, and now that he’s gone I cherish the memory of how hard he laughed at my tongue-tied chagrin until there was nothing left for me to do but join in…

*   *   *

When I first discovered all the discussion groups on LinkedIn I was licking my chops. I joined a gaggle of groups only to find that the term “discussion” is a bit of a misnomer. With few exceptions these discussions are merely an opportunity to post a static bill board without any reference to the comments that came before. Even when I directed my own comments at other posts in an attempt to “stir things up” I was usually ignored. Which only goes to show that despite the incessant hype about the importance of being “good listeners” we’re as addicted as ever to the sound of our own voice whether literal or literary.

But despite my disappointment, when I stumbled on a discussion entitled: What is Stopping You from Being an Entrepreneur? I couldn’t resist a topic with over a thousand comments. I eagerly read dozens of comments only to discover that they were little more than a litany of frustrated wannabe entrepreneurs bemoaning a lack of “capital.” Apparently if these folks just had money they would give Mark Zuckerberg a run for his own. It never seemed to occur to them that one of the things that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur is his ability to find capital or, likeSteve Jobs, jump-start a company without it. When I posted this position it was not only ignored, but the very next poster blamed a lack of “financial wherewithal” for his own frustrated entrepreneurial ambitions.

Philosophy has been my life-long passion. I’m often asked to apply this “useless” obsession to the practicalities of business, and all those LinkedIn comments about money and entrepreneurship presents an opportunity to do just that. Philosophers make a distinction between essential and accidental characteristics. It is essential to the “chairness” of a chair that it is something to sit on. Whether a chair is black or brown, made of wood or steel or has three legs or four is an accidental characteristic of a particular chair.

Essential and accidental characteristics are also related to another favorite of philosophers: the problem of identity. If you and I exchange heads, would I remain me with a different body or become you with a different head? In this case most would conclude that the head is essential and the body accidental. In other words, we are far more identifiedwith our head than our body.

Applying this distinction to entrepreneurship, it is my contention that being able to find the money to start a company is essential to being an entrepreneur while most of LinkedIn’s commentators considered it accidental. Mixing the essential with the accidental leads to many unfortunate mistakes in logic and therefore to bad business decisions. For many years personal computer manufacturers apparently thought that being boxy, steel grey, and uniformly ugly was essential to the nature of the PC. It took Steve Jobs to think different.

I’ve heard colleagues say that they are great at what they do, but they can’t do it under pressure. This argument is patently absurd. In business being able to perform under pressure is essential not accidental to being great at what you do. Business people who can’t perform under pressure remind me of the Zen story about the enlightened fish.

One day a group of Zen students came running to their Master carrying a big fish. “Master, Master,” they said, “we just caught an enlightened fish! What should we do with it?”

“Eat it,” the Master replied, “what good is an enlightened fish?”

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, an essential part of being a boy was dreaming about hitting dingers for the Pirates. Similarly, dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur seems essential to the American DNA. But the first step to actually becoming one is ruthless honesty. Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. It is accidental whether they are well educated or not, rich or poor, loquacious or quiet, male or female, young or old, single or raising six kids.

But what is essential to every entrepreneur is faith in himself and his destiny. Only faith overcomes the myriad fears that human flesh is heir to – the same unspoken fears lurking just below the surface of all those LinkedIn posts and just behind all their entrepreneurial obstacles. It is faith in yourself and your purpose that turns an obstacle like a lack of capital into a golden opportunity: an opportunity to demonstrate to the world, and far more importantly to yourself, just exactly who you are.

Finding capital is easy. It’s finding the faith that finds it that’s hard. This is why I attribute far more of my own success to the rarefied philosophy of the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching than I do to the practical wisdom of the Wall Street Journal.