In well-run public companies with a wide shareholder base, there is little ambiguity over leadership. The person in charge gets rewarded for success but also shoulders ultimate blame for blunders, especially when they cause severe damage to the company's interests. Moreover, the chief executive needs to be in the foreground when the brown stuff hits the fan; invisibility is not an option and visibility cannot be achieved by simply appearing in video messages. Life can be brutal in the business world and this means that when something really bad happens, the chief executive of the day is expected to step down. I imagine by now most readers have guessed where this column is heading: yes, it is indeed leading to the question of why Leung Chun-ying remains in office as Chief Executive. Remember that the SAR's head of government was consciously given a business-sounding title and noting Beijing's preference for a businessman to occupy this position, it is then hardly unreasonable to make a comparison between the role of business and government leaders. It should be said in parenthesis that any political leader operating within an elective system would most likely have departed by now in the wake of the kind of upheaval occurring in Hong Kong. But let's get back to the principles of leadership which are relevant to the worlds of business and politics. Leaders are expected to take responsibility because if they do not, their credibility will quickly shrivel. The reason is simple: if the chief executive tries, for example, to claim that things going on under his watch are the fault of others, it becomes clear that there was a lack of control at best and a lack of attention at worst. If, on the other hand, the claim is made that things occurred beyond his control, here is a clear admission of lacking ability to deal with events as they arise. There is no wriggle room here, either you are on top of the job or you are submersed by it. Of course some leaders are lucky and benefit from favourable circumstances that they did not create, but even the lucky have to know how to utilise these opportunities. Similarly, there are leaders who are really unlucky and have to deal with crises and other events well beyond their control, but they turned these crises into opportunities to make history. US President Franklin Roosevelt provided a stellar example of how this worked after facing a major economic depression and a world war. Some people confuse charisma with leadership qualities. Two of today's most successful leaders, Angela Merkel in Germany and Stephen Harper in Canada, can hardly be described as charismatic, but they have earned a great deal of respect for the way they have conducted themselves. Leaders earn respect not necessarily by doing what is most crowd-pleasing, but by seizing control of situations and demonstrating that they are on top of them. This is far from easy and explains why unsuccessful leaders outnumber successful ones. Leung takes the meaning of unsuccessful to new levels. He probably had the charisma gene removed at birth and deals with problems not by addressing them but by endlessly repeating formulas that were not even convincing when first annunciated. Even his stoutest defenders (a very small group of people) tend to frame their argument in defensive terms, claiming that he is being treated unfairly, or that he has only limited scope for action or - most damning but they don't seem to notice - that things are happening beyond his control. The argument for Leung remaining in office seems to pivot around the idea that Beijing would never allow his removal. Transpose this argument to the corporate world and you have a situation in which the major shareholder clings tenaciously to the incumbent chief executive while the more numerous minority shareholders demand his or her removal. Meanwhile, the company's customers and associates become so dissatisfied that they take their business elsewhere. At this point, even the most intransigent of majority shareholders is likely to think again and judge whether their chief executive's survival is more important than that of the firm. There is no guarantee that a new incumbent will turn things around - indeed things may get worse - but when situations are really bad, risks must be taken because the status quo is unsustainable. Leung still has an opportunity to show leadership but to do so he has no choice other than to resign. His predecessor Tung Chee-hwa did this, albeit using the dubious excuse of a medical ailment, but Tung has lived to fight another day and is even enjoying some kind of rehabilitation. This may be beyond Leung's capabilities but it does not prevent him doing the decent thing for once. Stephen Vines runs companies in the food sector and moonlights as a journalist and a broadcaster