To answer the second question, you can’t implement any of what we’ve taught in this book unless Rockefeller Habit #1 — “The executive team is healthy and aligned” — exists. The order in which you implement the other habits doesn’t matter.

So the art is to find the right balance between setting a direction and keeping practical.

If your people don’t know what the direction is, they won’t know where to go. The result: Energy dissipates, momentum slows, morale plummets, and the company drifts. It’s not a pretty picture. Making sure everyone sees the same picture and then understands what that picture means, Parson says, requires “more contact with people, more opportunities to meet them, and more communication.

One of the major traps for new leaders, however, is to select the wrong priorities - or, more colorfully stated, pick the wrong battles.

Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:

• Pick the future as against the past;

• Focus on opportunity rather than on problem;

• Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and

• Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.