Many potential employers put it directly in their ads – “must be a self-starter.” It is, apparently, an all too unusual trait. Perhaps more than any other trait, it separates the successful from the failure, the winner from the loser, the prosperous from the poor. A person with initiative does not wait to be told...

The first three installments in this series covering management’s most basic principles addresses Planning, Organizing, and Training. Once those have been done, or more realistically, once those are being done, the final principle is that of controlling action. If nothing is moving, the first challenge is to get things moving in an orderly manner. One...