It's Insular at the Top

I find that, in running my business, I am making many decisions alone. I know that can't be good. How can a leader keep from becoming isolated? — Arthur Lakiisa, Kampala, Uganda

It's something of a coincidence that your question arrived this week, just as two CEOs, Chuck Prince of Citigroup and Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, were cast out of their jobs and publicly crucified for the "sin" of surprising the market with bad results. Now, we don't know if either CEO had become isolated from the people in his organization who knew trouble was looming. But the size of the "expectation gap" suggests both CEOs were blindsided, at least to a degree, by their company's poor performance. Like you, perhaps, they were lonely at the top.