2. Demands: Leaders have to balance two often competing demands on the business — People and Process. This requires simultaneously maintaining a great reputation with the employees, customers, and shareholders (the People side of the business); and improving the productivity of how the firm makes/buys, sells, and tracks these transactions (the Process side of the business).

3. Disciplines: To effectively execute, there are three fundamental disciplines (routines): Set Priorities; gather quantitative and qualitative Data; and establish an effective meeting Rhythm. It’s in these meetings, debating the data (the brutal facts!), where the priorities emerge.

4. Decisions: Ultimately, all of the above require some decisions. To scale the business requires getting four key decision sets — People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash — absolutely right, and there are right and wrong answers. Shortchange any one element and you’re not maximizing your opportunity.

Because of these needed transitions, it’s often best to have some of the original functional leaders head business units — maybe head up expansion to a new country or lead the launch of a product line — so they can maintain direct operational control.

Senior leaders need to be in the market 80% of the week, either figuratively or literally.

We don’t need to predict every detail, nor could we if we tried. But if we want to make the future better, we need to identify actions that have positive effects on balance over very long timescales.

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be. I thought about that often when I was sitting down with the new team at EMP. It was tempting to weed out everyone who had a reputation as a less-than-stellar employee; eventually, some folks would need to be managed out. But first, I needed to make sure a hidden capability wasn’t lurking behind someone’s subpar performance.