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A few years ago, one of my clients was planning to step down as CEO within a couple of years and wanted to appoint his successor from inside the company. What made this tricky was that there wasn’t a single, obvious candidate. Recognizing that whomever he chose would need some time to grow into the role, he wanted to get an early start. The first step was finding out who was interested and how the rest of the team felt about them.

Rather than bury this issue in a series of secretive one-on-one conversations, he asked his team a simple question: “Who among you is interested in becoming our next CEO?” Three hands went up. What happened next was remarkable.

A few years ago, a friend of ours was given the task of diagnosing and fixing defects in the first version of a huge-brand consumer electronics product. The product’s initial launch had been an embarrassment. Worse, since it was first sold at Christmas and the defects didn’t become apparent for several months, there was very little time to get things fixed for the next holiday selling season.

A few weeks ago, a friend sent us an article by New York Times business columnist Adam Bryant along with this question, “In your experience, do these six ‘success drivers’ make sense?”

I read a post on LinkedIn from Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler, a behavioural economist (essentially a psychologist who tries to understand why we consistently do the seemingly irrational things we all do). You can see his post here. It describes an appalling situation – a British Marine was recently convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for killing a wounded and helpless enemy fighter in Afghanistan. Wheeler postulated that only a clear statement of a core belief, “Marines Don’t Do That,” might have been enough to stop the soldier from committing what most view as a crime.