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Let's be honest: you don't want to fail. But if you're a leader, you've more than likely failed at one point or another. One of the most prevalent reasons for failure is the lack of the essential elements needed to lead now and well. Here are four traits you must possess if you want to succeed as a boss: 1. Authenticity Every leader faces the temptation to project a persona rather than be themselves. They think that to maintain the confidence of their team, they must appear faultless, flawless and wise. Yet most organizations need an authentic leader, not a perfect one. Today's leader must develop the art of self-awareness. Quit trying to emulate someone else and start being yourself. Share and be honest about your own struggles. By doing this, you'll immediately gain influence. 2. Courage As a leader, you can't wimp out. You must be willing to be bold and take risks. Will it be hard? Absolutely. Will it be scary at times? Probably. But courage is not waiting for your fear to go away; courage is always confronting tough decisions and conversations head-on. You may find that this trait doesn't come natural to you. The good news is that courage can be learned. Start practicing now. 3. Principles Every organization fails at one time or another. If a leader is principled at the time of the failure, he or she is much more likely to learn from it and move on to success. Leaders are defined by their inner strengths and convictions, not the outer portrayal of who they are. Your character will determine your level of leadership and your legacy.Living on principle is one essential that will help you lead well and finish well. There are three elements of being a principled leader: humility, discipline and integrity. Want to know if you possess these three valuable principles? Start searching your speech for phrases like, "I'm sorry," "thank you" and "I trust you." Listen for patterns of "we" and "us" versus "I" and "my." Practice the art of these principles and establish an accountability system to help keep you grounded. No one likes a leader with a big head. Every strong leader shares at least one desire: to grow. Very few successful leaders say, "I think we're about as successful as we need to be. I've decided we should just coast from now on." If you want to grow, you need to start collaborating. Leaders tend to shy away from other leaders because they don't want to give away their secrets, but this mentality is backward. Collaboration creates innovation, reduces unnecessary risk and amplifies success. If you desire to advance your level of leadership, one of the best things you can do is to build bridges. 4. Collaborative spirit Start by looking for two kinds of organizations: one you have profound philosophical differences with and another that is in the same line of work, but not a direct competitor. Once you've found them, set up a meeting and begin sharing best practices and brainstorming. You'll be thankful you did. It's been said that following is easy, but leading is difficult. That is no doubt true. Leading in this century is a daunting task. But moving toward these healthy habits and characteristics will help you become a successful change maker capable of leveraging your influence for the betterment of the world and the collective good of others. Please follow Careers on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

After initially issuing its September profit warning and then reporting a dramatic turnaround last month, Burberry is back in a big way with its recently reported 20 percent sales growth for the year ending March 31, as well as record-breaking profit numbers. The company has several things going for it that have helped it in the China market, including targeted expansion, a solid digital strategy, and an apparel-heavy merchandise collection. Burberry’s digital strategy, which has been highly cognizant of e-commerce and social media, has paid off greatly, as a company spokesperson reported that the Chinese website’s traffic is up 70 percent. The label holds active accounts on four different Chinese social media sites and has over 400,000 fans on Weibo. Burberry stores in China also feature large interactive touch screens and sales staff armed with iPads in order to look up inventory online if it’s not available in the store. The British trench coat giant is also pursuing a store expansion plan in China that counters many companies’ decisions to push into second-tier cities, instead focusing on the first tier in order to maintain exclusivity. The label plans to open three stores in Shanghai in the coming year. There are several additional factors helping the brand in the midst of slowing growth for many other luxury companies. For starters, apparel, which makes up 60 percent of the brand’s inventory, is resisting slowdown effects in China much better than accessories, which are used more often for gifting purposes. In addition, since Burberry only entered China in 2010, it has so far avoided any effects of “brand fatigue.” The brand has also not ignored Chinese tourists outside the mainland, installing Mandarin-speaking staff in its European stores. The luxury slowdown for China isn’t over yet, however, and Burberry remains cautious about the upcoming year. However, as winners and losers begin to surface in the Chinese luxury market, the label appears poised to come out ahead for now. Please follow Retail on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

The victim of yesterday's brutal machete attack in Woolwich, South East London has been identified as 25-year-old Drummer Lee Rigby. He was part of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, an infantry regiment of the British Army. His friends called him "Riggers" and he had a 2-year-old son, according to a statement from the Ministry of Defense. Rigby served in Afghanistan in 2009 before taking up a recruiting post in London in 2011. He was a side drummer and machine gunner, according to the statement. The British government has labeled the soldier's killing a terrorist attack. Witnesses said two men wielding multiple weapons stabbed Rigby to death on a street while shouting "Allahu akbar," which is Arabic for "God is great." Terrifying video surfaced of a man with bloody hands talking to a camera about committing the attack. Police have identified 28-year-old Michael Adebolajo as the man in the video and a suspect in the attack. He's currently in the hospital after being shot by police. Please follow Military & Defense on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

There are few commencement speeches that last beyond the day they're given. One is Steve Jobs' 2005 address to Stanford's graduating class, where he famously used three stories to memorably define his life.  Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson used the same format in his Sunday commencement speech at Pomona College. He spoke about Jobs and his other most recent biography subjects, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, to drive home an incredibly important lesson. "You are officially credentialed as smart," Isaacson told graduates. "That's the good news. The bad news, as you'll learn, is that smart people are a dime a dozen, and they usually don't amount to much." Using one of the phrases most associated with Jobs, Isaacson argued that it's something other than smarts that defines the most successful people. "What really matters is those who are creative, those who are imaginative, those like Steve Jobs, who can think different," he said. Italics are quotes from Isaacson's speech. Steve Jobs "When he was 6 he and his father built a fence around the backyard of their house. And his father told him, 'We have to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front.' Steve said 'Why? Nobody will ever see it; nobody will ever know.' His father, who was an auto mechanic and high school dropout said 'Yes, Steve, but you will know.' People that really care about making things great even care about the parts unseen." That carried through to the first Mac, when Steve Jobs insisted that even the circuit board inside be beautiful, despite the fact that nobody would see it. It was the passion to make things perfectly that helped him develop his famous "reality distortion field." The creativity and drive of that mindset — that by sheer will he could, as Isaacson described it "bend the laws of physics, even bend the laws of human nature" — led him to create some of the things he's remembered for. "He would do it over and over again by being passionate. Not about making a profit, because he said if you're passionate about making a profit sometimes you cut corners. But if you are passionate about making a product or service, or are passionate about what you are doing, eventually the profits will follow because you will make things of value." So we got the Mac, the iPhone, and other genre-defining products; all things that Jobs pushed into reality because he had the will, passion, and creativity, not because he was smarter than everybody else. Albert Einstein "Us biographers, we always try to find that 'Rosebud,' that creation myth in childhood. For Einstein it was getting a compass. His father gave him a compass when he was 6 or 7 years old and he watched as the needle twitched and pointed north, And he becomes totally mesmerized by this. The needle nothing's touching it. Why is a physical object moving like that when nothing physical is touching it? And he spent years, his whole life, worrying about why does that work. "Now you and I probably remember getting a compass when we were 6 or 7 and saying, 'Oh wow, look, it points north,' and about 90 seconds later we're on to, 'Oh look, a dead squirrel!' and we're on to something else. On his death bed he was still writing equations trying to figure out why that needle points north." At 17, Einstein learned Maxwell's equations, which state that light travels at a constant speed regardless of how fast you're traveling. Einstein envisioned what would happen if he caught up with a light beam at the same speed and rode along side it. Wouldn't it appear stationary? Maxwell's equations didn't allow for that. Einstein wasn't considered the smartest guy around in those days. He couldn't get his dissertation accepted, or even get a job teaching high school. But the fact that he constantly worried about that question — prodded at it with his imagination — led to one of the great breakthroughs of scientific history. While puzzling over the signals going between synchronizing clocks, he had a moment. "Then he realizes, with just a leap of the imagination, not a leap of mental processing power, a leap of the imagination and a willingness to think different and challenge the conventional wisdom, because every other physicist of that time knew what Newton had told them at the very beginning of the 'Principia': that time marches along second by second irrespective of how we observe it. "And you've got this patent clerk saying, 'How do we know that? What if we caught up with the light wave?'" Light is a constant. Time is relative. That's the core of the special theory of relativity, which upended science. "All because he thought different, he had that leap of the imagination," Isaacson said. Ben Franklin "Ben Franklin had that passionate curiosity," Isaacson said, "but he also had a sense of tolerance, which I think is the real lesson learned in childhood." After running away from home as a young man, Franklin went to Philadelphia. While there, he created a club, the Leather Apron Club, for the shopkeepers and artisans, the middle class people whom he wanted to found a nation on, which listed the values that they ought to have; things like industry, honesty, and frugality. "Being a geek, (Franklin) marks them on a chart and marks every week how well he does on each of those virtues until he could master them. "Then he shows them around to the people in his club that he has mastered all 12 of those virtues. And one of the members says to him, 'Franklin, you've forgotten a virtue you might want to practice.' And Franklin says, 'What's that?' and the friend says, 'Humility. 'You might try that for a change.' "Franklin said that 'I was never very good at the virtue of humility, I never mastered it, but I was very good at the pretense of humility, I could fake it very well.' "Here's his great insight, He said, 'I learned that the pretense of humility was just as useful as the reality, it made you listen to the person next to you, made you try to find that common ground that was the essence of the middle class democracy that we were trying to found.' "For the rest of his life, he was the person amongst all of the founders who worked to bring people together." At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was 82, and they were tearing themselves apart over the big state little state issue. He told everybody that the lesson that he learned as the oldest man there was that we're fallible. He made the argument that while compromisers didn't make great heroes, they made great democracies. That the diversity of our opinions will lead to a common ground better than our original opinion. Each state had to part with some of their demands. Eventually, Franklin made the motion to have a House and the Senate, creating the compromise that's held our union together. That compromise was a culmination of a life spent listening to other people. Isaacson wrapped up with what all three men had in common: "Let me say that they all had something more than these three little tales, these three little traits. They all had something they shared. They all realized that they were part of something larger than themselves. "All over the country right now people of my generation — the baby boomer generation giving graduation speeches — are probably saying the same thing, which is, follow your passion wherever it leads you. "I'm going to tell you something different. It ain't about your passion, it's about being a part of something larger than yourself. It's about connecting to your passion, to what's engraved on those gates, that you will go forth and give benefit to mankind. That you will go forth and be good. "Because at the end of your days when you look back — when you come back for your 50th — your family — kids, grandkids — the people you graduated with, come back with you. It's not just about saying how successful you were, how many toys or trinkets or how much power you accumulated, it's about what you created, about what you did to make the world a slightly better place because you were here." At the end of his life, Ben Franklin was led to his grave by every Minister and Priest in Philadelphia as well as the Rabbi of a Jewish synagogue because he had donated money to every one of them. Albert Einstein, on his death bed, wrote nine pages of equations trying to create a unified field theory, to answer the question of why the needle of a compass twitches, trying to write "one last line that he thought would get us one step closer to what he called 'the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe,'" Isaacson said. And Steve Jobs, when asked by Isaacson what his legacy would be, said that life is like a flow that we get to take great things out of. Things people have invented, ideas or theories they've come up with, and so on. But your legacy is what you put into it, not how much you manage to take out of it. "When you leave here, read that gate," Isaacson said, "and make sure that you, too, both follow your passion but connect that passion to something greater." Disclosure: The author went to Pomona. Go Sagehens! Please follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

Twitter was ablaze last night after Indianapolis Pacers head coach Frank Vogel's decision to bench center Roy Hibbert at the end of last night's game. With the 7-foot 2-inch Hibbert sitting, LeBron James made a game-winning, buzzer-beating layup. Twitter second-guessing is normal, but the crowd was more than couch coaches. ESPN commentator and former Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon went on a rant: Vogel should apologize to his team for sabotaging their chance to winEnormous coaching mistakenot once but twice — Michael Wilbon (@RealMikeWilbon) May 23, 2013 U can't worry about Bosh jumper there if you're Vogelyou know LeBron can get to the rim in 2.2! Hell, u just saw it previous possession! — Michael Wilbon (@RealMikeWilbon) May 23, 2013 Grantland founder Bill Simmons ranted as well: Why take Hibbert out? Why take Hibbert out? Why take Hibbert out? Why take Hibbert out? Why take Hibbert out? Why take Hibbert out? — Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) May 23, 2013 Rick Reilly got in on the action, too: So the Pacers paid Roy Hibbert $13M this season 2 sit on the bench at the end of regulation +OT in Game 1 vs. the world champs. — Rick Reilly (@ReillyRick) May 23, 2013 Vogel's decision to bench Hibbert, not once but twice, in key moments in the game undoubtedly led his players to question his thought process. ESPN's Brian Windhorst said Pacers players were discussing Hibbert's epic block on Carmelo Anthony in the Eastern Conference Semifinals after the game. Vogel first benched Hibbert with 24 seconds left in overtime. With five fouls on his big man, the logic went that Vogel wanted to protect Hibbert for a final offensive possession. Following the substitution James scored on a layup to give the Heat a 101-99 lead. Hibbert returned to the game for offense with ten seconds left. But what Vogel likely thought would be the final posession was not when Paul George was fouled on a three point attempt with two seconds left. George made all three free throws. With two seconds left, Vogel again subbed out Hibbert. In a moment of uncertainty Vogel made a serious coaching blunder. Why keep your best rim protector on the bench with two seconds left in a one point game? Against the best player/attacker/dunker in the world? Vogel said he was concerned with a Chris Bosh jump shot. But after the game and James's game-winning drive, he reconsidered. "I would say we'll probably have him (Hibbert) in next time," Vogel said. Hibbert himself said he should have challenged Vogel's decision. "I think as I get older, I may have to [ask to stay in]," Hibbert said. "I didn't, and in hindsight I wish I did because LeBron's layup was one I think I could've [blocked], because he served it up." The Pacers can take solace knowing they shoulda, coulda won Game 1. The statistics of the game closely followed our blueprint for an upset. However, the Heat's win does fall in line with our series prediction. Please follow Sports Page on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »