Reflections of a stormy petrel

This point was made pretty solidly in The One Minute Manager, and The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey: to get ahead you need to work hard, so people at the top tend to be hard workers. However, it's not how many decisions a leader makes that matters, but the quality of them. A single decision can make or break any organisation, including a country. A leader needs to be willing to spend days, weeks or even months carefully considering important problems, not making work for themselves. And if they can't find the time, they should be delegating more - if only to train up the next generation of decision makers.