Britney Spears, Osama bin Laden, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates - all leaders of one sort or another. But what makes them so? We recognise instinctively what a leader is. As social creatures, we have each assembled our own personal mental map of hierarchical relationships and how to place ourselves within them. But even the experts cannot agree on what our unconscious criteria are.
One way to find the common denominator is to compare extremes - say, Jesus and Adolf Hitler. Christ suffered willingly, trusted the untrustworthy and was profoundly selfless. Hitler avoided exposing himself to physical danger, was distrustful and egotistical. But, arguably, the features they shared - well-timed, unyielding ideological passion and the magical quality ascribed to their persons - was what most marked them out as leaders. Is leadership about ideology and charisma?
Not necessarily, according to the breed of money-making consultants who concern themselves with the topic. In the marketplace, leadership takes on a whole new set of meanings and consequences.
It is no less the repository of dreams, however. It is now standard practice to attribute to business leaders - say the chief executive of a tyre company or steel plant - the heroic features of a transformation-centred visionary. This theme is purveyed chiefly by a well-drilled battalion of gurus, the volume of whose works must surely by now exceed that of the Apostles. Feely-touchiness also fares well in their doctrine. Leadership bestsellers bristle with variations of the themes of openness, support and 'gung ho' teamwork.
Raking through the literature for further areas of convergence, one discovers that the old yin-yang dichotomy in leadership styles has been resolved. True, aspiring leaders do tend to err on the side of being either too self-assertive and task-oriented on the one hand, or too empowering and people-oriented on the other. But, happily, this is nothing that attendance at a couple of pricey seminars cannot cure. Such is the gist of the In Search of Excellence family of theorists.
Naturally, there are alternative theories. One is that of Canadian-born psychoanalyst and management expert Elliott Jaques. He invented the 'midlife crisis', a term that has become part of the language. His stratified systems theory is hard to put into a nutshell. It is based on how people in many different cultures and situations organise themselves into hierarchies - whether to work or to fight. What is most natural - and what works best in his view - is unfashionably rigid levels of authority and accountability. His methods for testing and predicting who is mentally equipped for leadership also depart entirely from conventional wisdom. He is unlikely to make it on to Oprah because his theories are undemocratic, long-term and, in the age of self-improvement, recognise that leaders are essentially born - not made.
At the heart of his theory is the concept of time. Each strata in his hierarchical system is defined by the target completion time of the longest task assigned to people at that level. At one end of the scale are people who cannot think beyond the weekend. They belong in stratum one. At the other are those few with a Churchillian gift of looking across centuries.