Being a successful leader is not an innate skill that you are born with. It has to be learned. My experiences as the Founding Director of the Belfer Center at the Dana Farber Institute and serving as a Professor in the department of Medicine at Harvard helped me grow and learn many important lessons. But they did not prepare me for the challenge of envisioning a new future for a major organization like MD Anderson and moving the entire organization to embrace and enact that vision. Here are just some of my lessons learned, which I hope you will find beneficial.