You don’t have to make every experience in life a WOW. If everything is a WOW, then pretty soon, nothing is a WOW. But you must be able to identify which experiences you want to make a WOW, and then have a process—or a “technology”—for creating that outcome. I call this “the how of WOW.” It involves asking five questions.

The most important thing you can do as a leader is to keep your heart open.

…Maintaining an open heart—pumping possibility through your organization—is the most important thing you can do as a leader.

As I was reflecting on the game Monday morning, I thought that the Giants, particularly Eli Manning, demonstrated four characteristics of all great leaders:

…It would have been easy for the Giants to listen to the drift of the media and assume they couldn’t win.

Every stream has a current. Throw a twig or a piece of paper into the water, and it will drift with the current. This is natural. It is simply the way things work. Organizations are similar to streams. They too have a flow.

There are probably as many different philosophies of creating an annual budget as there are companies. When I came to Thomas Nelson initially, the philosophy was the push-up, pull-down philosophy. Management would try to get the individual units to push up their revenues budget as high as they could and push down their expenses as low as they could go.

Inspirational leaders set the pace. Inspirational leaders believe in the future.

Many years ago, I had a boss that drove me crazy. He insisted on micro-managing me. He wanted to know every move I made. I had to furnish daily status reports with every call, every conversation, every project, etc. It really got to me. I tried to be patient, but I eventually quit. I just couldn’t succeed in that environment.

This is probably the most important question you could ever ask. The answer will determine how fast you advance in your career and, more importantly, how happy you are in your job. Many of us have had to figure it out the hard way—by trial and error.

The secret to staying on top of your personal and professional life is to schedule regular times for review and reflection. You need to assess where you’ve come from and where you are going.

Every now and then we are reminded how fragile life is. You just can’t take it for granted. For example, a few years ago I was attending the early service at our church. My family was coming in a separate car and had not yet arrived. About ten minutes into the service, one of my friends walked up behind me and whispered in my ear, “Mike, your family has been in a car accident. You need to leave … now!”

One key to leadership is the willingness to stand up and take responsibility for your mistakes. Good leaders do this even if they are guilty of 10% of the accusation or problem.

I spend more hours in meetings than out. Perhaps you do, too. Over the years, I have cataloged a list of annoying meeting behaviors or just “AMBs” for short. None of these by themselves are that bothersome. But when you combine three or four of them in the same meeting, it can test the patience of Job.

The ability to sell an idea or project to your boss is critical to your success. If you can’t get your boss’s approval when you need it, you are not going to go very far in your career.