Ram Charan took his first business lessons while working in his family' shoe-shop in India. Describing that experience, he writes:

Constant vigilance about cash aligns your mind to
KNOW WHAT customers buy,
WHY they but from you, and
WHAT TO DO when things don't sell.

He has identified eight fundamental skills needed to succeed as a leader:

1. Positioning (and when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money
2. Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others
3. Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business
4. Judging people by getting to the truth of a person
5. Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts
6. Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve
7. Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals
8. Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business

On skill #8 (Chapter 8: It is Monday Morning - Now What), he writes:

Goals are set at fifty thousand feet. Priorities are set at ground level where you must have the tenacity, attitude and willingness to probe the messy details to think through and define WHAT the most important actions should be and what their second- and third-order consequences will be.

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