First, it's clear that awards like the ones cited above tend to be accumulated when one is at the peak of one's career. Often, there is no place to go but down.

But more often than not, the failures occur when a leader moves into a context that is unfamiliar or when the context around them changes in a way that they don't know how to handle. For some, the problem is growth of their own company, for others it's a change in the company's markets or in the economy as a whole, and for others it is taking a job in an unfamiliar business or company.

In looking at these as well as other Chief Executives, I have developed the following guidelines that will inform my thinking in the future:

■ Leadership is situational and business leaders are not religious figures who need to be adored and worshipped. Avoid worshipping any leader whose legacy is still in flux in any way. Even notables like Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner may turn out to have been wrong. It may take as long as a decade for us to know for sure whether many of their strategic decisions have staying power.

■ When a company's business environment changes, the CEO may very well need to go. Example McNeally. He was a fantastic and charismatic leader through Sun's two decades of fantastic growth. He has also proven useless during their post-dotcom retrenchment. Eisner at Disney is a similar example. He achieved his greatest successes during his early years as CEO, when he realigned, reorganized, pruned, acquired and grew the company and its various pieces. But he also turned out to be a terrible person to operate that company once it was put together.

■ A CEO who is fantastically successful in one place is not likely to be as successful elsewhere. Sculley is a good example of this, though Carly Fiorina is probably a better one. It irks me to hear her various fans, including Jack Welch, talk about how she should have been retained because she was such a great leader. I was there and some of my colleagues still are. Nobody, except for those people who know her from the Lucent days, believes she's a great leader. The truth is that her leadership just didn't work out at HP. Not to take away from previous successes, but the challenges of HP were different and she wasn't properly equipped to deal with them.

■ In that vein of thought, I think an outside CEO generally needs to be somebody who will be moving to a similar and somewhat familiar environment in order to stand a chance. There are rare exceptions like Lou Gerstner who successfully moved from Procter and Gamble to IBM, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. (Though some would argue that the organizational issues facing him in both those jobs were ultimately pretty similar.) I am much more optimistic about HP (HPQ) because Mark Hurd is experienced at turning around a technology company in a slow and competitive market, something Fiorina never did.

■ Pay attention to seconds in command. Eisner's probalems truly began with the death of Frank Wells, his powerful and effective behind-the-scenes COO. He never had the ability to take over Wells' operational capabilities, and never had the will to impose a new powerful COO on the rest of his subordinates. McNeally and Barad had even greater problems. Virtually their entire executive teams were pushed out or resigned out of frustration. When an "exemplary leader's" closest associates lose faith or are no longer trusted, it's time to wonder what is going wrong.

■ Sometimes, the "exemplary leader" can become a good "elder statesman" who is worth watching even if his early successes are unrepeatable. While Perot probably would have done himself a favor by just selling EDS outright and not trying to then join the GM board of directors, his brief and contentious tenure on the board was a great indicator of everything that was and is still wrong with that company.

Above all, I believe it's necessary to be a skeptic, if not an outright cynic, about corporate leaders of all types. Sadly, the stock market bust and the many scandals since then have not, in my opinion, introduced sufficient skepticism into the mutual admiration society that exists between Wall Street and many "superstar" CEOs. My suspicion is that it will take a much greater and more sustained collapse before this dynamic falls by the wayside.