took a prime position in a miami steak house, something he initially did not want to do.

shula: i'd gone through 33 years of coaching, of spending, you know, all your waking hours involved in what your responsibilities were. and in retirement, i didn't want to spend all of my waking hours thinking about, you know, what my responsibilities in a restaurant business were.

fourteen years later, shula's is the fourth largest 4)upscale steakhouse chain in the country. his twenty-four restaurants spanning from south florida to manhattan to salt lake city, last year 5)grossed 60 million dollars. "success", the old coach says, "comes from teaching the same strategies that worked on the 6)gridiron?

shula: it's a people business. coaching is a people business. and, you know, my responsibility through the years as a coach was to make decisions, to motivate people, to have a game plan, to stick to the game plan, be organized, get the most out of every minute of every day, and all of those same principles, you know, are the same things that you teach in the restaurant business.

shula's steakhouses are 7)shrines to that magical year of seventy-two. at shula's, waiters and waitresses are called players, managers coaches, top-performing employees are even given game balls. success is not forever, and failure isn't fatal.

shula: there's always that next competition. you gotta continue to prove yourself. the important thing is to learn as you continue to be successful, and don't ever feel that you know it all, that you're got all the answers.

8)taking yourself on may be the hardest part to personal 9)transformation. being 10)accountable for mistakes, failures, shameful behavior, even cruelties; but that's what leaders do. they say, and 11)psychologists also 12)counsel, that being accountable is the first step towards real change.

forseema: people really don't understand the power that they have within themselves.

dennis forseema is the former ceo of high-tech firm, redback networks.

forseema: we all have the power to change ourselves in whatever way we want to change. but first you have to want to change. something 13)significant has to happen in your life to make you want to change. by the fact that i 14)stuttered, you know, while i was growing up, i was made fun of. i was 15)pudgy when i was growing up as well, so here's this fat little pudgy kid who stuttered, and i used to get made fun of a lot. and so that helped drive me to want to change. so in my case, it wasn't a bad thing. i think that there are things there could be role models, you know, in your life where you see good things happening from that role model, or to that role model, that make you want to try to emulate what they're doing. but we all have the power to change within ourselves.

leslie: i think the most important event in my management development was the failure of my first 16)entrepreneurial company, which was a very, you know, great personal extension of myself.

before he helped build software powerhouse, veritas, former ceo mark leslie went bust.

leslie: i had, you know, enormous psychological investment in it, it failed, and it, you know, was the most difficult thing i had to deal with. at the conclusion of that i said, you know, "i'm gonna be either bitter or better." and i wanted to be better, and so i spent a good deal of time thinking about things and trying to understand why this wasn't successful. and there are many reasons, and it's very easy to find all the reasons that were other people's, which is the bitter part, you know. but i really said, let's look at myself and see what i could learn and much of the way i am today really comes from, 17)stems from that experience.

journalist: what did you learn that you had to change?

leslie: well, i learned that the management style... i come from a company where had a very quite 18)autocratic management style, actually. and that's kinda where i grew up and in leaving that company, i decided to do differently the things i didn't like and to do the same the things i did like or the things i thought were successful.

journalist: wait a minute. most people don’t believe that you can succeed by doing what you like.

leslie: what i found when i did that was that i was a pale reflection of someone else’s management style, leadership style of a company. it wasn’t really something that was my own. it was something that was theirs, kind of once 19)removed, you know once 20)modified.

journalist: first of all, what you’re saying, one of the things you said is that to be 21)authentic was the first step towards being successful.

leslie: yes. i think that’s true.

if all of this is a little too “new-age” for you, remember that personal transformation is actually an ancient and 22)recurring theme in 23)mythology, in philosophy, and in literature. and one of the best-known stories of personal transformation is that of ebenezer scrooge, charles dickens' classic 24