Based on my favorable reaction to these business studies, I decided to join a strategy consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group, rather than a law firm after graduation. Within a few months, I found myself along with many other young colleagues at a gathering of more than 50 Fortune 500 CEOs at a Cape Cod retreat.

All of the CEOs were eager to learn how to recruit top young MBAs to their companies, so we had plenty of chances to get acquainted. It quickly became obvious that these CEOs weren't very well rounded. They knew at most one functional discipline well and struggled for how to think about trade-offs between doing more in one area versus another area.

The CEOs were like drivers who were headed for a new destination with no road signs to help them and only an incomplete map for guidance. Someone who could provide helpful directions would be very valuable to such people.

Over the next three years, I had plenty of opportunities to help define new directions for Fortune 500 CEOs and other senior executives. Their lack of perspective continued to surprise me.

The big picture was mostly invisible to these executives. Why? My impression is that the CEOs were chosen primarily for their ability to scramble for successful solutions to unexpected problems rather than for their potential to select an improved direction for the organization. These CEOs mostly chose new directions by default, as an unintended consequence of the scrambling solutions they put in place.

In delving through client materials, I learned about another form of optimism that I hadn't seen before: near-term pessimism combined with long-term, pot-of-gold fantasies. This estimation of the future could be found in requests for funding of acquisitions, capital investments, new programs, or new products.

The same way of thinking about the future would also show up in three-year and five-year plans. Immediately, these people said, it was going to be expensive and painful. Later, irresistible progress would follow.

Typically, those making these estimates were simply looking at how they might improve their learning and error rates in the future while ignoring that competitors and new entrants might also be making rapid progress. Unfortunately, competitive conditions became even tougher when everyone became more capable. As a result, the actual long-term results often got worse rather than better. This was a recipe for taking expensive painful steps that lead you into a worse place than you already were.

With more experience, I also discovered that organizations (I also did consulting for nonprofits) were filled with problems that they hadn't been able to solve for many years. Yet hope sprang eternal, and everyone was convinced that the next attempt was sure to succeed even if it were no different than the last attempt. This perspective was like thinking that sending more light brigades of cavalry to charge a well-entrenched enemy during the Crimean War would succeed where the last one had not (Tennyson's poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" commemorates the fatal charge in 1854 during which 247 of 637 British cavalrymen were killed or wounded following a foolish order during the Battle of Balaclava in the Ukraine). In one case, I led the eighth or ninth consulting team in 10 years to look at the same problem. Imagine how much more could get done if problems were solved properly on the first attempt!

One reason for these unresolved problems was the lack of helpful information. The accounting results for problem areas didn't look so great, but you could study the accounting numbers all you wanted and those numbers wouldn't give you any clues about what needed to be done.

Instead, you had to develop a whole new set of measures; simulate change in a dynamic environment in which customers, beneficiaries, suppliers, and competitors would make adjustments; and identify paths that left you better off regardless of what happened with factors outside of your control. That way of thinking was as incomprehensible to most leaders as an obscure foreign language they had never heard before.

The consultant's major task was to be able to translate those new possibilities into some expression that leaders could grasp and appreciate. Analogies, metaphors, stories, and vivid graphics were important to communicating complex information that others could not internalize from the detail. I was reminded of telling my dad he would have to earn $1.25 for an hour a week to pay for his lift while having four more hours available. Perhaps I should have taken more literature classes.

What next job will teach you the most about what it takes to get to and succeed at the top?

How are you going to get that job?