bought one of their cereals from a supermarket and found it stale. The CEO of the company included chatty newsletters in the boxes, and I noticed that the newsletter in this box was from the previous year. The company had a good customer services reputation, so I wrote to them and suggested that they talk to the supermarket about their stock rotation -- explicitly saying that I wasn't looking for compensation. The CEO was overseas, but his assistant, knowing what he would do, not only wrote me a nice letter but sent me a new box of cereal as well. Even though I'd already said that I knew it wasn't their fault. That's the kind of response that builds loyalty. Know effective action when you see it, and have the strength to take it A good leader can spot an opportunity and take it, where a "strong" bad leader would be blinded by ideology and a "weak" bad leader would be afraid and indecisive. Ideology makes you inflexible, and fear of giving offense or making the wrong decision makes you immobile. But the ability to take calculated risks makes you an innovator -- and a hero. Think about the leaders who introduced women's suffrage in New Zealand (before any other nation). At the time, that seemed like a risky, even wrongheaded move to many people. But it doubled the electorate at a stroke, and now we look back on those men as visionaries. Lead for the right purpose I was