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This book focuses on four key elements that can help anyone resist common leadership pitfalls and build a leadership style that gives them an edge. Based on my own experience, research, and lessons from the best leaders I know, these four elements are the keys to success:
1. Knowledge, and your ability to gain and share it
2. Expectations, and your ability to model and drive them within an organization
3. Hard work, especially when paired with big dreams
4. Trust, in yourself and in the people around you
Equally important is how you utilize these elements as a leader. I'm not the first person to talk about what makes someone an effective leader, but I often find that books and speakers on the subject don't talk much about the difficulty of applying these elements and making them relevant on a broad scale. Each of the elements I mentioned must be applied in a balanced way, not one-sided or driven by the leader alone. I call this balanced application "the barbell approach." When I was in marketing at Burger King, we used something we called the barbell strategy to build our menus. Every menu needed value items on one end—those affordable, price-conscious items—that would drive traffic to our restaurants. At the same time, the menu needed premium offerings on the other end, items that would catch the customer's eye once they were in the restaurant and drive up the ticket. There was always something for the customers and something for us—a successful menu always needed an even balance of the two.
That is the same approach this book will take. For each of the four key elements, you will find two chapters: one that describes how to apply that element personally and another that shows how to promote it among the people around you. This barbell approach means there is something for you and your people in each of the elements being discussed. The balanced application of the right elements is what will allow you to continue to gain an edge time and time again. To ensure you're on the right track, each section of the book ends with an assessment tool that will allow you to score yourself and monitor your progress.
