Tom Hood has already penned an awesome post about renowned author Emmanuel Gobillot’s thoughts on leadership, but I couldn’t resist a quick addendum.

I spoke with Emmanuel shortly after his keynote at the 2010 Interchange Conference in Pasadena and asked him what today’s ideal leader looks like. His answer:

“Anything, as long as it’s you at your best. Rob Goffee (a professor of Organizational Behavior at the London Business School) described it best when he said the aim of any leadership development is for you to be yourself, just better, with skill. I don’t want to preclude it by saying,‘This is the type of leader we need.’ As long as you are being the best you can be, just being yourself, with self awareness, self control, the ability to understand, then I think any style of leadership will do in terms of how it is expressed, as long as it is expressed naturally and authentically. It falls apart when you try to be someone you have never been.”

Did you catch that? As long as you stick to your values and inspire greatness and loyalty in others, Emmanuel says any leadership style will do.

Listen to Emmanuel’s thoughts in their entirety here:

One more quick thought from Emmanuel … and I’m paraphrasing here:

We each have roughly 14,600 days left on this planet. (Some of us have considerably fewer than that, but that’s beside the point.) Couple that with a recent survey that asked older Americans what they would do differently with their lives, given a second chance. Their responses: Ask bigger questions, take more risks and live life with purpose.

Emmanuel’s question to us is, “Why wait?” The only difference between today and tomorrow is that tomorrow’s number is 14,599. The countdown begins from there.

What will you have to show when that number reaches zero?