Leadership is “one of the most observed and least 1 phenomena on earth,” wrote one man in a position to know. In business, interest has focused on three aspects of the phenomenon: • the nature and behavior of leaders; • the nature and behavior of those who are led; • the structure of the 2 in which the leading takes place. Most is written about the first of these. There is a strong fascination with leaders and their 3 , and with the great issue that surrounds them: can they be made or are they only ever born? There is no general agreement about the qualities of a leader. Field Marshal Montgomery thought that a leader “must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of 4 . He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome.” Henri Fayol, an early French writer on management, said that the leader’s task is “thinking out a plan and ensuring its success.” It is, he added, “one of the keenest satisfactions for an intelligent man to 5 .” David Ogilvy, founder of an advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, and himself a leader of some quality, said: great leaders almost always exude 6 . They are never petty. They are never buck-passers. They pick themselves up after defeat ... They do not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved ... The great leaders I have known have been curiously complicated men. The leadership of people like Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors, however, owed more to the 7 and systems that they put in place in their organizations than it did on the individual’s personality. Henry Ford II’s success in revitalizing his family’s firm after the second world war depended largely on his reorganization of the company. The man himself was a jet-setting 8 who rarely met the David Ogilvy standards of a great leader. Abraham Zaleznik, in an influential article in Harvard Business Review, argued that leaders and managers are basically different, the conditions favorable to one may conflict with the growth of the other. In other words, a long career as a 9 may not be the best training for a leader. Yet this is the training that most business leaders get. The nature of leadership has been discussed since time immemorial. In perhaps the most famous book on the subject, The Prince, written in Florence in the 1520s, Niccolò Machiavelli set out his ideas about what a prince must do to survive and prosper, surrounded as he inevitably will be by general human malevolence. Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons. Many a corporate chief has a copy near his 10 .