Think about this: we have inspirational stories—both real and imaginary—of people who went from extreme poverty to mega wealth, from alarming sickness to obsessive health freaks, and from ignorance to wisdom. However, we don’t even bother making up stories of bosses who went from terrible to amazing. If we did, they would probably be classified as science fiction. In contrast, and as earlier chapters have demonstrated, there is no shortage of real-life examples for leaders who were great until they deteriorated. The pathway from good to bad seems much easier than the one going from bad to good.

Traditionally, most advice you hear about management assumes a longer time frame where if you spend a little today, you’ll reap bountiful rewards in time. But that’s only true if your organization isn’t on fire. If it is, then all bets are off. At that point, you need to do whatever you can to extinguish the flames.

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a famous theory, known today as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to explain human motivation. The basic idea is that certain needs trump others and you must satisfy lower-level needs before focusing on higher-level ones.

If you can’t breathe, for instance, it doesn’t matter if you are hungry, lonely, or unemployed. At the moment when your face starts turning blue, everything in your being will focus on how to fill your lungs with oxygen. But if you’re breathing fine, it doesn’t mean that life is perfect either. You’re simply now able to address the next most critical barrier to your survival: getting food into your stomach.

Once you’re able to breathe, your stomach is full, and you’re in a safe environment, then you can focus on the next levels up in the hierarchy, such as being part of a community that supports you or contributing something meaningful with your life—what Maslow called “self-actualization.”

Given that you’re reading this book and wondering how you can become a better manager, it’s probably safe to assume that your organization is not on the verge of imminent collapse. But if it is, then set this book down right now and figure out what you need to do to help your team turn things around. Can you rally the troops for a spectacular gambit? Can you brainstorm some MacGyver-esque tactics to get you out of your tricky bind? Can you roll up your sleeves and pitch in on making cold calls or selling glasses of lemonade?

When you are in survival mode, you do what it takes to survive.

When you’re beyond survival in your team’s hierarchy of needs, then you can plan for the future and think about what you can do today that will help you achieve more in the months and years ahead.

I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

Author and Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Sydney Finkelstein completed the largest research project ever on leadership failure, for his groundbreaking book, Why Smart Executives Fail. According to Finkelstein, true failure - “spectacular failure” - is the result of a series of destructive behaviors (seven, to be precise) that executives in failing companies exhibit:

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their competitive environments, even if this view is out of step with reality.

1. They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their own self-image and interests and the company’s image and interests.

1. They think they have all the answers, often impressing others with the speed and decisiveness with which they deal with significant issues.

1. They make sure that everyone is 100 percent behind them, ruthlessly eliminating anyone who disagrees with their views.

1. They are the consummate company spokesperson, obsessed with managing the image of their company and themselves, often devoting the largest portion of their time to image management.

1. They underestimate fundamental major obstacles, treating them instead as temporarily impediments to be simply removed or circumvented.

1. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past, clinging to the strategies and tactics that made them successful in the first place.

In 1992, Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science, based on her work with organizations and leaders on what is effective, through a lens

of quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory. Her key learnings were that:

• everything is about relationships, critical connections;

• chaos is an essential process that we need to engage;

• the sharing of information is fundamental for success; and

• vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos and information.