Hundreds of books and articles have been written on leadership – most are written by academics based on surveys and by people, who neither held penultimate leadership roles in sizeable global organisations nor directly worked with any truly great leaders. So, it isn’t surprising that leadership is a much talked about topic, yet misunderstood by most. In my search for unearthing the real traits of great leaders of our generation, I caught up with Sukhendu, whose development as a leader is similar to an apprentice chef learning the amazing culinary skills in the hot kitchens from some of the world’s iconic chefs. Sukhendu saw firsthand how Mother Theresa started her journey in Calcutta as an immigrant to become a global icon as well as his experience of working with people who led their companies from the start-up to world beating organisations, including Larry Ellison and Geoff Squire of Oracle, Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems, Steve Garnett and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, John Reed of Citicorp and Sandy Weill of Travelers Group. Here is what I discovered.