You tell them....then you ask them

Thinking of Jobs': You don't ask people what they want.  You tell them what they want. 

why do we ask people what they want then?  I think you say, "This is what you want"....then you ask "do you need anything else"  ..... you don't start out by asking them what they want. You provide something and then you move to that step.  This seems to be paramount.  And is not necessarily done very often.

The urge to be positive as a leader

You really have to fake a lot to make a lot.  Positive efforts help to exploit the emergence of more positivity.  So if you can help the positive emerge then you can make a lot more than if you boil on the negative.   Being negative all the time leads to recursive improvements on such a small aspect of the effort....that is to say, you can be rigorous on 2 or maybe 3 things and move them forward.  The problem is that things in nature have to die.  And they have to die a lot.  So the thing to do is to start with a lot of different things....then do them at 90%....then you take the small number of 90% things that survive then you ensure that you take a negative focus on the ones that survive because it makes them stronger.

tl;dr - start out at 90% with a bunch of things and then move the things that survive into the negative realm.