Management thought leaders share their ideas on what future leaders can’t live without. Featuring: Angel Cabrera, Bill George, Daisy Wademan Dowling, Andy Zelleke, Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld, Evan Wittenberg, Dr. Ellen Langer, and Scott Snook.

This is pretty straightforward stuff but a refresher on what keeps us at the top should never be scoffed at. In summary, remember to believe in yourself, don’t worry about being perfect, put up a brave front, and do the best you possibly can. Anything short of that will cause you to slip.

Marshall shared a few more pointers I thought you might enjoy:

1. Don’t worry about being perfect. There are never right or wrong answers to complex business decisions. The best that you can do as a leader is to gather all of the information that you can (in a timely manner), do a cost-benefit analysis of potential options, use your best judgment — and then go for it.
2. Learn to live with failure. Great salespeople are the ones who get rejected the most often. They just ask for the order more than the other salespeople. You are going to make mistakes. You are human. Learn from these mistakes and move on.
3. After you make the final decision — commit! Don’t continually second-guess yourself. Great leaders communicate with a sense of belief in what they are doing and with positive expectations toward the achievement of their vision.
4. Show courage on the outside — even if you don’t always feel it on the inside. Everyone is afraid sometimes. If you are a leader, your direct reports will read your every expression. If you show a lack of courage, you will begin to damage your direct reports’ self-confidence.
5. Find happiness and contentment in your work. Life is short. My extensive research indicates that we are all going to die anyway. Do your best. Follow your heart. When you win, celebrate. When you lose, just start over the next day.

For every company, reaching that inflection point where things start to fall through the cracks is a true test of long-term viability. The exact metrics are different for every company, but the ability to anticipate these issues, add professional management to negotiate them and put ego aside in the pursuit of supporting the right outcome determines success or failure.

Not surprisingly, first-time founders fail more often than serial entrepreneurs at navigating these growth pains. Serial entrepreneurs more often have the self awareness to step aside or recruit executives with complementary strengths to support scale. Also, serial entrepreneurs more often go out and attract advisers who help hold them accountable to making these changes.

One outstanding question that applies is how to generate better performance from their workforce.

The answer is not to jettison a company’s existing approach to enterprise learning—even one that relies heavily on more traditional and formal classroom learning experiences. The answer is an additive one: Optimize the blend of formal training, informal learning and knowledge-sharing activities that a company makes available to its people.

All employees have the opportunity within the learning environment to establish a presence or social profile that reflects their expertise and interests. They can then create and share their knowledge and experience, even search for peer insights, all organized by user-generated tags and topics. People and their content are linked to one another through team sites, instant messaging, blogs and discussion threads. Material is also rated by peers during the sharing process according to quality and applicability.
Accenture recommends proceeding on the path to social learning in the following way:

• Strategize. Work with senior leadership to conduct a business-case analysis of where opportunities exist to improve employee productivity and performance through an improved learning environment. State those opportunities explicitly in terms of wasted spending as well as opportunities to generate better business results.
• Evaluate. An important step for Dare2Share was an “innovation day” when we brought together many of our best thinkers and practitioners from BT and Accenture to review and debate the merits of various Web 2.0 technologies. The point of review and debate at this stage is not about just the technologies but the business and learning needs those technologies address.
• Prove. Start with a workable proof-of-concept followed by a pilot test involving a representative sample of your employee population. Test the technology, functions, usability, content, learning networks and rewards programs.
• Promote. Use the success of your pilot to generate enthusiasm around the rest of the organization. Use good marketing methods and senior executive sponsorship to increase awareness and engagement.
• Measure. Monitor usage, gather feedback and measure results, feeding all that back into subsequent releases of the social learning solution.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #1: 40,000-fold increase in the number of websites in 15 short years. If the number of approximately 5000 websites in 1994 is correct and that we are now part of some 200 million plus websites today, then we’ve experienced a stunning 40,000-fold increase in number of websites.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #2: It feels like it was only yesterday that Evan Williams coined the term, “blogger” as founder of Blogger.com before taking the head post at Twitter. Today, the blogosphere is doubling between once and twice a year and there are over one million blog posts daily.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #3: Speaking of Evan and Twitter, there have now been more than five billion tweets.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #4: Not to leave out some of the other obvious big web names of our day, here are two stunning stats on Google and Facebook. Google still owns the search market. Sources estimate that the search goliath receives about two billion queries per day. That said, I think I’m more impressed by InsideFacebook.com’s estimates that the social network is adding 700,000 new users per day.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat # 5: What is amazing is that whether you look at the global top ten or US top ten websites, about half of the sites are five- to six-year-old companies (e.g. YouTube, Blogger, and Facebook). The implication is that we’ll continue to see a pretty high-rate of churn amongst the top ten.

According to a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey, 79 percent of all companies have cut costs in response to the global economic crisis—but only 53 percent of executives think that doing so has helped their companies weather it. Yet organizations continue to cut. Cost reductions often go wrong, we believe, and our experience suggests that they can be done in a better way.

In an example of how badly things can go wrong, McKinsey offers a story.

An international energy company that needed to save money fast started by simply defining the amount of savings it needed and then required each department to cut costs by a similar amount, primarily through head count reductions, which varied from 17 to 22 percent. The reality, however, was that the company needed to invest more in certain technological areas that were changing quickly, as well as in operations, where performance was far below industry benchmarks. What’s more, the HR and IT departments substantially duplicated certain activities because different layers in the organization were doing similar things. Much deeper cuts could therefore be made in these functions, with little strategic risk. But the company cut costs across the board, and just six months later, technology and operations were lobbying hard to bring in new staff to take on an “uncontrollable workload,” while substantial duplication remained in HR and IT.

We have identified four steps essential to facilitating the successful integration of sales operations. At the top of the list: understanding the importance of sharing information about the integration process with customers and the sales force. Many companies take the opposite approach and are surprised when postmerger revenue fails to meet expectations. In addition, the combined sales team must quickly win prominent accounts to build momentum and generate internal confidence in the merger. The executives running the integration effort must also recognize that, as important as sales reps are, essential support people must be identified and retained. Finally, senior managers should review the merged portfolio of customers and make tough calls about those that are worth new investments and those that might be shed or given less attention.