Do not strive for excellence... And a few business words.

Do not strive for excellence; rather, go for best yet.

Talk about optimise -- but practise a policy of slight improvements.

Pursue and promote leadership as a competency, but recruit executives -- people who do things as opposed to people who talk about things.

Only you, the leader (and politicians, aspiring leaders), are there to talk about things rather than do things.

Do NOT recruit talent to satisfy management consumerism needs, but because you need gifted people.

You only need gifted people if you are, yourself, gifted; otherwise such people will get you down. If, however, you yourself are gifted, then the result of working around such people will be uplifting and the precursor to your operating at high potential.

Your core team is usually composed of people you know, are used to, and who know you, and are used to your quirks. They are the best people out there, if you define best as, "the least fatiguing, getting my job done satisfactorily". The reason you chose one person and not the other is not competency of one over the other. It is other things. You can identify these. Do so.

Tricky Business

Remember that scandals SHOULD not be the resort of business development & improvement and they are NOT, unless when business comes to close exchange with politics -- or when politics becomes the better, or an important, part of the business.

Politics can become the better part of business in democratic and authoritarian environments. The democratic environments are better in the short run because they operate under a veil of legality; authoritarian environments are presumed illegal in politically-correctese.

In the long-run, however, political business is best practised in authoritarian environments because these are (inter alia):

• less corrupt (this no longer holds true in Africa) and thereby cheaper
• more predictable, short-term
• safer, short-term
• more efficient because of red-tape exemptions
• more efficient because of quick decision-making.

Remember the maxim:
"The price of democracy is corruption; the price of efficiency is dictatorship"©

This image has little direct relation to the above UNTIL you come to realise that she works for you in some capacity other than the one illustrated here. Hence you are correlated.