Finding the right balance between optimism and realism

Here are a few excerpts from an Interview with Steve A. Balmer (CEO of Microsoft) published on New York Times:

"....if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do.

I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

if you really want to get the best out of people, you have to really hear them and they have to feel like they’ve been really heard.

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations."

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17corner.html