Chapter 7, “Early Leaders.” Again, if you’re a CEO or business owner don’t skip over this thinking, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m not an early leader.” You’ve got early leaders on your team. Challenge yourself to become a better leader. Serve early leaders well.
Early leaders tend to be immersed in mastering the basics of their job responsibilities, understanding the dynamics of their organizations and demonstrating the capability to lead groups to deliver results. 
As they develop their outside insight resources, they have two primary things to consider: a) they have to learn to develop a few key advisory relationships (to begin to get regular doses of a third opinion) and b) they have to lay the groundwork for their long-term leadership circles.
For advisory relationships, the objectives are to find expertise, develop your capacity to apply critical thinking, break through real and perceived mental barriers and to accelerate your own development from the experiences of others. Developing these relationships should be done in the context of daily work in order to elevate your performance. It’s about making full use of the third opinion.
Improving Exponential Thinking
Companies reward those who deliver results. The ability to sort through information, form assumptions, test them, and then communicate an opinion and offer direction are critical leadership skills that are the foundation of expert thinking. Exponential thinking goes one level beyond. You look for hidden assumptions, attempt to disprove (instead of prove) hypotheses, actively seek out data points that don’t fit, and analyze trade-off and risk. The author provides an extensive series of questions designed to help early leaders improve their exponential thinking. The skills are difficult to develop alone. You need thinking partners.
Learning To Listen
It’s never too early to develop the habit of listening in order to learn from others. Again, the author provides a series of questions every early leader can ask themselves to improve this skill. It’s about learning to integrate multiple perspectives to improve your thinking. Feedback is critical in helping you close the gap between reality and your perceptions.
Ms. Joni mentions the various circles where thinking partners might be found for an early leader: corporate contacts, academics, trade associations (or trade shows), partners/alliances, job search contacts, alumni networks, and nonprofit activities/nonwork organizations.
Joni suggests seeking out thinking partners with a few people on specific issues. Keep it tight, narrow and focused. Be careful about advice, “Here’s what you should do,” and instead seek deeper conversations that broaden your perspective. She appropriately mentions that you should look to give as a thinking partner to somebody else. (Note: She doesn’t spend near enough time on this in my opinion. The book is mostly a what’s in it for me approach, but that’s understandable since she’s urging leaders to incorporate these things into their life – and it’s a hard sell to urge most people to improve with a different approach.) There’s a lot of learning to be accomplished when we’re helping others though and it’s good to be reminded of that fact. 
The chapter ends with a deep dive using her Star Of Complexity Map approach to developing the skill to apply insight that drives results. Illustrated with stories, Joni has many questions and diagrams to help the reader better understand her suggested approach. The word “complexity” is appropriate because I find this material worthwhile, but overly complex for my tastes. However, some leaders may find such an approach very helpful so give it a go.
Chapter 8 is entitled, “Key Leaders.