In reply to Ken Otter.

This article (via Johnnie Moore) http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/2502/ on "Managing without Leadership" reinforces the idea that leadership is not all it's cracked up to be:

Our everyday experience tells us that organisational life is messy and complex and that those in positions of leadership are neither omniscient nor infallible. Why, then, do we quite readily believe that there is a causal link between organisational functioning and leadership? Why do we not believe our own experience that how things work in organisations is much more complicated?

Where do we get the idea that ‘leadership’ is the right explanation for the organisational phenomena we encounter? There is a discrepancy between the ways in which members believe that their work places operate and how theories of leadership account for organisational functioning.

If I had to nominate one overarching objective for this project, it would be the development of a causal, bottom-up account of organisational practice, in place of top–down theories of leadership that are incapable of accounting for the specificities of individual experience, because these are always generated and bound by the nature and conditions of their contexts.