A very small percentage of people can enjoy the role and find it rewarding. "Today there's a greater emphasis on leaders' relationship skills," says Jim Landau of The Executive Connection, who has coached CEOs one-on-one and in groups for the last 15 years. "Leaders are also expected to live to higher moral standards than before, demonstrating sensitivity to a whole range of social and environmental issues." That's on top of grappling with a greater level of complexity in business in a rapidly changing environment, including a volatile economy. "There's a hell of a lot more pressure than a decade ago," says LeasePlan Australia's CEO Spiro Haralambopoulos. So what qualities define leaders who excel in an environment of such duress? "I love what I do," was the most common theme among the Australian CEOs of large and small outfits interviewed for this article. But there's more to it than that. When Menkes probed the inner workings of 150 CEOs from a range of industries, he distilled three defining attributes that allowed top performers to do Better Under Pressure (the title of his book). The attributes didn't include a healthy work-life balance. "You can't be an exceptional CEO and still have time for hobbies and a normal social life," says Menkes. Rather, he found a "mental architecture" comprised of realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos -- that is, being able to cull data from the many variables affecting business to make good decisions. In most cases these skills