A Successful Manager

What makes for a successful Manager?

An MBA degree from a recognized university?
Good presentation skills?
Good personality?
Good and consistent academic performance with high marks in school and college?
Good with statistics and numbers?
Good inter-personal skills?
Good interaction with other team members?

A manager is never born. (S)He is made! Even this does not gaurantee success, I mean when they are 'made' managers.
What does produce good and successful managers could be the following:

their understanding and applying knowledge to their projects,
their passion for their projects,
giving this passion some shape,
listening with patience to the dissident voices as well as those who agree with them,
to have the understanding that each and every idea will take time to work,
to set a time limit for work completion,
to have the time and patience to allow it to work,
to work and monitor work,
to have the courage to stop work for quality checks instead of waiting till all the work gets over and then start complaining,
to pull up people and bring them to give their best,
to pat those who perform well,
to give credit where it is due,
to refrain from thinking all others are useless and it's like suffering idiots, while (s)he is the only exception to this rule,
to avoid pitfalls of being partial to some and harsh to others in the team,
to encourage the team to ponder over how to solve problems instead of having meetings just to thrash out only the problems' part of any project,
to give both the financials as well as operations side equal weightage, if weak in one then not to shy away from listening to those who know
and
to appreciate and thank each member of the team when the project is successfully completed.

These come being in touch with ground realities and never got by sitting in a cabin and watching others work.

Certainly education, good degrees with good marks will come in handy to land a job but there are things beyond which nothing except one's own commitment, passion, having a team spirit, positive knowledge, having an open mind to learn further and being an optimist certainly helps.

May we never stop learning ever for the day we think we know everything and we are the only perfect souls around, it is sure to lead us into deeper pits where getting back to ground level might be next to impossible.

Mahalakshmi.