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In search of lessons to apply in our own careers, we often try to emulate what effective leaders do. Roger Martin says this focus is misplaced, because moves that work in one context may make little sense in another. A more productive, though more difficult, approach is to look at how such leaders think . After extensive interviews with more than 50 of them, the author discovered that most are integrative thinkers -that is, they can hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once and then come up with a new idea that contains elements of each but is superior to both.