I hate it when the next month’s HBR comes out before I’ve read the good articles in this month’s! So I’m busy reading these days. The one article that is a “can’t miss” in the June edition is by Roger Martin, titled “How Successful Leaders Think.”

The short version: successful leaders use “integrative thinking,” which means they have:

…the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tensions between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.

Note that successfully resolving conflict (through synthesis as opposed to force or compromise) is a core element of the thinking of successful leaders.