What It Takes is the distillation of lessons learned during nearly half a century of working backstage with the leaders of major professional firms as a trusted adviser on strategy and management, observing a few firms rise deliberately to leadership while many others with comparable hopes could not. Over and over again, in dozens of private meetings with firm leaders, the core questions were: Why do some firms rise to leadershipand why do most not make it? What does it take to excel? Perhaps even more important, what does it take to sustain excellence over years and decades, through success and adversity? Experience teaches that in a competitive market, organizations can rise to acknowledged leadership only by excelling in several specific areas: defining a compelling organizational mission and developing a strong complementary culture; consistently recruiting clearly superior people and training them intensively; organizing and motivating them to work in effective te