Let’s begin with the thought nobody in the leadership industry will say aloud: what if leadership – not the failure of leadership, not the wrong kind of leadership, but the concept itself as it’s been fashioned and sold for the past half-century – is part of the civilisational crisis we’re trying to negotiate rather than any part of its solution?
This is not me being overtly cynical. It’s a structural argument. And it requires me to be precise about what I mean, because vagueness here is exactly how the industry has survived every serious challenge to its most seminal proposition.
We are clearly not short of individuals posing as ‘leaders’. The planet is overcrowded with them — elected, appointed, self-declared, and algorithmically amplified. We’re not short of leadership development programmes, leadership frameworks, leadership competency models, or leadership coaches. The global market for leadership development alone is measured in tens of billions of dollars annually and has been growing for decades. By every metric the industry uses to measure itself, leadership has never been more pervasive.
And yet. The polycrisis deepens. Institutions fail at the scale of the challenges they face. Democratic systems produce outcomes that majorities don’t want, leaving their citizens seething with frustration. Planetary systems approach thresholds that no number of leadership summits has managed to address. If leadership were the solution, we would by now have some evidence of it working.
The heretical question is not why we need better leaders. It’s why the leadership frame — the entire way of thinking about human agency, collective action, and transformative change through the lens of leadership — keeps failing to produce what it promises and keeps being reapplied in spite of that.
A Borrowed Category
Before examining what happened to the concept, it’s worth asking where it came from — because the vocabulary of leaders and leadership didn’t originate in organisational life. It was transplanted there, and the transplantation carried an enormous cargo of ideological assumption that was never declared at the border.
The language of leadership – vision, courage, decisiveness, the capacity to inspire and command – is drawn overwhelmingly from military and political life. Its deepest roots run through nineteenth-century great-man historiography, Carlyle most explicitly: history is made by exceptional individuals whose personal qualities determine collective outcomes. Armies, empires, and the fate of civilisations turned on the character of those who led them. That framework was already culturally prestigious, already embedded in the grammar of how educated people understood agency and change, when the business schools went looking for ways to distinguish and elevate what their graduates did. They didn’t invent the concept of leadership. They borrowed it and packaged it precisely so that its pre-modern cachet would confer on organisational life a gravity it could not possibly generate from its own resources.
The military inheritance is especially consequential, yet unexamined. The leadership literature is saturated with assumptions that originate in command structures: hierarchy as the natural form of collective organisation, direction as flowing from the top, the leader as the locus of vision that others exist to execute. These assumptions are so deeply embedded in the vocabulary that most leadership frameworks reproduce them without thinking, let alone justification. The concept of followership — which the industry periodically rediscovers as an insight — is diagnostic precisely because it can only exist as a category within a framework that begins with a leader who requires followers, rather than with a collective task that requires distributed agency. The very grammar of the inherited vocabulary forecloses the question.
What the business schools discovered, however, was something the generals and statesmen had not fully appreciated: the concept’s pre-modern vagueness made it commercially inexhaustible. Military leadership could be assessed against the outcome of battles. Political leadership could be assessed against the fate of states. But organisational leadership, transplanted into the more diffuse terrain of firms, institutions, and markets, could be perpetually redefined without any equivalent accountability. This confusion, it turned out, was not a problem to be solved. It was the product. A concept tethered to clear consequences could be taught once and applied. A concept permanently resistant to precise definition could be taught forever, in endlessly refreshed iterations, to an unlimited market of people persuaded that they had not yet quite grasped what leadership really means.
This is the founding condition of the modern leadership industry: a borrowed category, carrying undeclared assumptions from a pre-democratic era, reinvented as a commercial proposition precisely because its inherited vagueness placed it beyond the reach of the accountability standards applied to everything else taught in business schools.
The confusion is structural and self-sustaining. Which means that what followed — the progressive deterioration of the concept across the latter half of the twentieth century — was not an accident. It was a trajectory written into the concept’s commercial DNA from the very beginning.
Retreat from Reality
Within that already compromised inheritance, something further happened across the latter decades of the twentieth century that has barely been studied. The concept retreated, step by step, even further from reality into abstraction — and each step made it less useful as a diagnostic tool while making it considerably more profitable as a product.
The first step was from leading to leader. This seems trivial but is not. ‘Leading’ is a verb — a practice, a situated activity, a relationship between people in a context with particular stakes. It is falsifiable: either something changed, improved, shifted because of what someone did, or it did not. ‘Leader’ is a noun — a type of person, a bundle of qualities and skills, a category to be studied, described, and eventually developed. The shift from verb to noun moved the question from what is happening to what kind of person does this. From consequence to character.
The second step was from leader to leadership. This is where the abstraction became genuinely untethered. Leadership is not a person, not an activity, not a relationship. Is it a property, a quality, a — what exactly? Nobody can quite agree. The literature runs to literally thousands of definitions, which is itself indicative. When a concept requires thousands of definitions, it is not being refined; it is being defended. Leadership became, in the hands of the industry that grew up around it, precisely what it needed to be to remain indefinitely teachable, indefinitely consultable, and indefinitely saleable: an abstraction rich enough to accommodate any interpretation and empty enough to avoid any accountability.
Crucially, this abstraction served an ideological function that has gone largely unremarked. Every time a crisis – political, organisational, civilisational – is diagnosed as a failure of leadership, it forecloses the harder and more threatening question: what structural, systemic, or epistemological conditions produced this outcome? The leadership frame personalises what is structural. It locates the problem in the inadequacy of individuals rather than in the architecture of systems. And in doing so, it protects those systems from examination. This blame game is a convenience — and convenience, sustained long enough, becomes a worldview.
The Misreading That Launched an Industry
Against this background of progressive abstraction, Abraham Zaleznik’s 1977 Harvard Business Review article, ‘Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?’ looks less like an origin statement than a brief interruption — a moment when something real and resistant to commodification entered the conversation and was promptly misread in the direction the industry required.
Zaleznik was not offering a development programme. He was making an observation about genuinely exceptional individuals — people who, by temperament, history, and what he did not hesitate to call psychological complexity, operated in fundamentally different ways from the managers who populated most organisational hierarchies. His leaders were not better managers. They were different kinds of human beings, shaped by different experiences, often including significant suffering and discontinuity, orientated toward transformative rather than transactional ends. His argument was aristocratic in the classical sense: these people exist, they are rare, they matter enormously, and they cannot simply be manufactured.
The industry’s response was to democratise the insight commercially. If Zaleznik’s leaders had distinguishing characteristics, those characteristics could be identified. If they could be identified, they could be taught. If they could be taught, everyone was a potential leader — which meant the market for leadership development was, in principle, unlimited.
The move seems generous: we’re all leaders. But it performed a quiet evacuation of everything that made Zaleznik’s observation significant. Genuine exceptionality is partly inherited. It emerges from specific conditions, specific histories, and specific orientations that cannot be replicated by a three-day programme in a conference centre. More importantly, the people Zaleznik described were exceptional toward particular ends — transformative ends that frequently put them in conflict with existing institutional arrangements. That is precisely the kind of person the leadership development industry structurally cannot produce, because it is funded by and orientated toward the perpetuation of existing institutional arrangements. And so the industry commercialised the form of Zaleznik’s argument but discarded the substance. What remained was the abstraction ladder, now with a prestigious academic citation attached to its first rung.
The Status Trap
This retreat from reality produced a second pathology that has received even less attention: leadership became a position designation rather than a practice description.
This is so embedded in ordinary usage that it takes effort to see it clearly. We refer to ‘the leadership’ of an organisation, meaning the people at the top of its hierarchy, regardless of what they are actually doing. We call people ‘leaders’ because of where they sit in a structure, not because of what is changing as a result of their presence. The word has been captured by position.
The consequences are serious. When leadership is defined by position, it becomes possible – routine, in fact – to occupy a leadership position without actually leading in any meaningful sense. Equally, and this is the loss that rarely gets named, the people doing the most consequential work of improving collective conditions are rendered invisible by the framework, because they hold no positions that would qualify them for the designation. Community organisers, Indigenous knowledge holders, regenerative farmers, teachers working against systemic odds — none of these appear in the leadership literature because the framework renders them invisible.
The extreme case makes the logic clear. Dictators and authoritarian tyrants are routinely discussed within the leadership framework — their styles analysed, their techniques catalogued, their failures diagnosed in leadership terms. But if we are serious about what leadership means, this is a categorical error. Despotism operates through the suppression of the distributed intelligence, agency, and collective capacity that genuine improvement of human conditions requires. It is not bad leadership. It is the structural opposite of leadership. The confusion arises entirely from having allowed position and title to substitute for practice and consequence.
A Different Starting Point
In The Five Literacies of Global Leadership, published in 2007 by Jossey-Bass, I proposed a definition that tries to cut through precisely these pathologies: leadership understood as a collective phenomenon for improving one or more aspects of the human condition. A shared responsibility orientated toward the greater good.
This definition does several things simultaneously that matter. It anchors the concept in consequence — in the improvement of actual conditions — rather than in attributes, positions, or abstractions. It makes leadership in principle falsifiable: either conditions improved or they did not, and the burden of that assessment can’t be discharged by reference to an individual’s qualities or aims. It makes the collective the subject from the start, not an aspiration bolted on after the fact. And it immediately resolves the problem of despotism: not by moral fiat but by definitional logic, since tyranny cannot improve the human condition while simultaneously depending on the suppression of the capacities that improvement requires.
From this definitional ground, it becomes possible to develop a taxonomy of leadership functions that is orientated by scale of obligation and relationship to time, rather than by personality type or hierarchical level. Stewardship, in this taxonomy, carries the meaning of trusteeship across a transition — receiving something of value intact and passing it on intact, with care for what one holds rather than what one owns. Custodianship is something more active: the guardianship of what cannot speak for itself, of what has no institutional voice in present decision-making — the natural world, future generations, the social fabric that underlies any particular arrangement of power. These are not decorative additions to a conventional leadership model. They are different relationships to time and obligation that the conventional model structurally excludes.
What this taxonomy makes visible, and the mainstream framework cannot see, is the full range of human activity orientated toward collective flourishing. It redistributes the category of meaningful agency.
The elder maintaining the coherence of a community across generations, the farmer practising genuine stewardship of land and water, the teacher transmitting not just knowledge but ways of knowing — these are exercises of leadership in the fullest sense of the word. That the mainstream framework cannot see them is not a limitation of these people. It is a measure of how comprehensively the framework has failed.
A Design Feature, Not a Bug
The leadership development industry cannot hear this argument — not because its practitioners are unintelligent or unserious, but because the argument is structurally incompatible with the industry’s existence as currently constituted.
The industry sells a product. To sell a product, you need a concept that is teachable, scalable, and independent of specific context. The abstraction of leadership — decoupled from practice, from consequence, from the particular conditions of particular places and times — is exactly what’s required to build a global curriculum. A definition of leadership anchored in the actual improvement of actual conditions is, from a commercial standpoint, nearly useless: it requires evaluation, it resists standardisation, and it can’t be taught in three days to people who will then return to unchanged institutional environments and be expected to behave differently.
More fundamentally, the qualities that actually matter for navigating the kind of civilisational transition facing us today are not the qualities the leadership industry selects for or develops. The capacity for distributed sense-making — holding complexity without forcing premature resolution — is the opposite of the decisive, vision-setting, direction-providing function that most leadership models celebrate. Comfort with deep uncertainty and ambiguity is structurally at odds with the confidence projection that institutional hierarchies reward. The ability to think across nested time scales — to hold the immediate and the multigenerational in simultaneous view — is precisely what is sacrificed by the quarterly rhythms of institutional life. An orientation toward the well-being of living systems rather than the performance of metrics runs against every incentive structure that produces the people who rise to positions the industry is paid to prepare them for.
This is not a correctable error within the existing paradigm. It’s a design feature of the paradigm. The leadership industry is not failing at its own goals; it is succeeding. Its goals are simply not the goals that the present civilisational moment requires.
The Thought Worth Having
The unspeakable thought, stated with the precision it deserves, is this: we have been applying an individual solution to a systemic failure, and that individual solution has become the primary mechanism by which we avoid confronting the systemic failure. Leadership, as currently conceived and industrialised, does not point toward the conditions that need examining. In fact it points away from them.
What would it mean to take the alternative seriously? It would mean beginning not with the question of who leads but with the question of what conditions need improving and what collective capacities are required to improve them. It would mean making the assessment of consequence — actual, demonstrable change in actual conditions — the only legitimate measure of whether leadership in any meaningful sense is occurring. It would mean extending the category of legitimate agency to the full range of human activity orientated toward collective flourishing, including the forms that carry no institutional title and attract no development budget.
It would mean, most uncomfortably for those with professional stakes in the existing framework, asking whether the leadership industry has been, on balance, part of the problem it claims to be solving. That question will not appear on any leadership programme curriculum. Which is, perhaps, all we need to know.