We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”                                                                                                    - Aristotle
Excellence is timeless. Quality - the pursuit of excellence - in products, services, and ideas will prevail over time over all other attributes. A key challenge for organisations is to increase speed - of development, delivery and thought - while maintaining and enhancing quality. Being the best is seldom easy, and in the short run, cutting corners may seem expedient. But excellence is a timeless value, one that is regarding both in its pursuit and in its outcome.
Competition
Organisations are in a rush to achieve targets, reduce costs and remain competitive. Competition has become a springboard for opportunities, but before pursuing and capitalising on opportunities one has to be a good competitor. And to be a good competitor, he has to attract and retain the basic components of the market. Given the inherent human nature of ‘'I first’, the real radical revolution needed is a fundamental modification in the interpretation and application of this basic attitude to bring it in consonance with the need of the day.
Organisation that more rapidly senses, adapts to, and copes with the short and long term implication of customer/market/managerial demands and technological innovations and will have a futuristic perspective for with tomorrow's uncertainties and opportunities. Futuristic managerial skills and its tool, innovative termination, is a means toward that end.
The strides are rapid and portends of the need for global citizens' in the coming years. While no one can imagine having access to all the information generated worldwide, leave alone imbibing or applying it, this impossibility seems to be becoming a necessity.
In such proviso of 'survival of the fittest', Leaders have an awesome job and a pivotal role. They are the wheels that turn an organisation vision into reality through people. They are the voice that translates organisational goals into products and services. They guide and encourage their employees' success. It is their practices that mould their organisational success or failures.
Precisely, the word leader implies at least two things. First, it implies movement. In order to lead, you must be going somewhere; toward a goal, or a vision. Second, it implies that there are followers. If nobody is following, you are not leading. A leader must have a clear vision, the ability to effectively communicate the vision, and the ability to inspire or motivate people to follow.
In fact, employees too, want leaders who provide visionary leadership, operate strategically, ensure that systems and appropriate resources are in place, and move their Organisation towards success. They also want leaders, who are visible, tell the truth and champion solid values. Workers want to follow someone who walks his talk and demonstrates integrity, empathy and compassion.
The most admired leaders in business are also the most successful one. They share business acumen that merges the ability to deliver on financial goals and the wisdom to invest in their people. They understand that all pieces in the organisational puzzle must fit together to achieve goals. Today's aware leaders are also getting ready for the comeback.
Challenges
It is the leaders who befit to create value through relationships. But many leaders still have the illusion that they are the ones who really “make things happen”. Admitting that you don’t have all the answers is a big part of building good relationships - and a big part of getting good results.
Today’s leaders are facing incredible challenges.  The rate of technological change alone exceeds anything that seemed possible only a few years ago. The more machines take over routine work and the higher the percentage of knowledge workers, the more leaders are needed in the Organisation. The work left for humans involves innovation, seeing things in new ways, responding to customers by changing the way things are done. We are reaching a time when every employee will have take turns leading. Each will find circumstances when they see what must be done and they must influence others to make their vision of a better way a reality.
Through the strategy of innovative termination the Organisation moves into a higher stage of organisational development. Its future destiny is viable, because it has absorbed change, rather than have been absorbed by change. Within this framework, innovative termination becomes the organisation protective shield, the early warning defence against new managerial preferences and technological developments. The Organisation that most effectively adapts to the material and technological innovation is most likely to survive and perpetuate its kind. The future of the past is in the future.
Therefore, to fulfil the organisational goals the human relations in it should be one of cooperation and amicability. The idea is to work together. Do what you can to get the absolute best from all of your people. If you're going to meet-and hopefully surpass your goals-your people need to be motivated.
There needs to be a broad range of ideas, freely expressed, from every perspective available. Such openness can mean the difference between being seen as a “market leader” and being the subject of a “where are they now?” piece on the History channel.
Especially today, the organisations have to focus on results, and leaders in those organisations must not only focus on results but take responsibility themselves to get them. Otherwise, they will get outsourced or declared redundant and replaced with people who can produce
Dimensions
The best of leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage. These are the four intelligence; the four forms of perceiving the languages for communicating that are required to achieve meaningful, sustained results.
The visionary leader thinks big, thinks new, thinks ahead - and, most important is in touch with the deep structure of human consciousness and creative potential. Reality is the polar opposite of vision. The leader as realist follows this motto: Face reality as it is, not as you wish it to be. The realist grapples with hard, factual, daily, and numeric parameters. A master in the art of the possible, the realist has no illusions, sees limits, and has no patience for speculation.
Values
The protocol refers to the basic human values of integrity, love, and meaning. This dimension represents a higher level of development, one ruled not by fear or pleasure but by principle.
Courage is the realm of the will; it involves the capacity to make things happen. The philosophic roots of this dimension lie in fully understanding the centrality of  free will in human affairs. Courage involves both advocacy - the ability to take a stand - and the internalization of personal responsibility and accountability.
The real challenge of leadership is to develop all four of these often-contradictory modes of thinking and behaving at once. Leaders tend to operate on two dimensions at most, which has more to do with a lack of insight than with corrupt intent. Reality dominates, and the second-most-common attribute is ethics:
Consider the statement "People are our most important asset. “Unfortunately, those are often empty words - not just because too few people make the connection between profits and human values, but also because there is no adequate understanding of what it means to be a human being in a brutally competitive environment.
“Vision” might be one of the most overused words in business, but in fact vision - in the sense of honing great thinking and fostering the capacity for ongoing inventiveness - is rarely practiced. And courage is demonstrated even more rarely.
Power resides in the capacity to choose, not in the choice itself. The cultures we have grown up in have ill-prepared us to even know the meaning of choosing. Rarely do we know how to distinguish between an option and an authentic choice - one of our own creations.
Followers
We are well trained to follow the rules: to consult with authority and to defer to the collective view. We are not encouraged to challenge the status quo but to embrace it, to run with the pack rather than to travel alone. Survival is in the collective, in the group-think and the group-speak.
This perspective is destined to limit human expression since the process of embracing the status quo leads to eating your own tail. Eventually, you disappear.
Great leaders created their own opportunities to fight for what they believed in. This is the challenge and opportunity for every leader to “excel”. Leadership also comes from one of the two things: persona or character. Persona is the coping part of our personality - a mask that we create to protect ourselves from external stresses and internal fears.
Character is the essence of who we are; it goes beyond what we do. It’s critical to spot the cues that signal when you're in character and when you’re relying on a persona: Under what circumstances do you tend to get stuck? When do you overreact? When does everything come together and flow?
May be some leaders are more talented than others and some are more educationally privileged. But every leader will have the capacity to be great.
Greatness comes with recognising that your potential is limited only by how you choose, how you use your freedom, how resolute you are, how persistent you are - in short, by your attitude. 
Influence
And what excellent executives have in common is that they will be caring, instructive and affirmative, growth oriented, champions, refined, stretchable, leading, and loving through personal example. They understand that leadership is a matter of influence, not position-influence that results from being both respected and liked!
People follow because they want to, not because they have to. Leaders who seek excellence are excited, engaged, joyful, and intensely focused-they are passionate, and their passion is contagious!
So, always seek ‘excellence’ in yourself and others. Mediocrity is not an attitude that generates credibility and trust, yet it is one that prevails in many organisations. If you consistently produce work that is excellent, your reputation will certainly be enhanced.
Action driven
Truly successful business leaders out-think and out-anticipate their competitors in order to out-perform them. Leadership is action, not a position. Leadership is defined by what we do, not the role we are in. Some people in “leadership roles” are excellent leaders. But too many are bosses, “supervisors,” technocrats, bureaucrats, managers, commanders, chiefs, and the like.
Too many people separate the act of leadership from the leader. They see leadership as something that they do - rather than as an expression of who they are. Conversely, many people who have no formal leadership role are excellent leaders. In today’s fast changing world, we all need to be an executive excellence, not the like.
The writer’s e-mail:  habeeb_ahamed@hotmail.com