PurposeThe purpose of this article is to elucidate the limitations of contemporary approaches to developing leaders and to present alternative approaches.Design/methodology/approachThis paper offers a review and critique of the assumptions on which current leadership programs are based.FindingsMost leadership training initiatives fail to produce leaders. Typical programs teach leadership theory, concepts, and principles; they promote leadership literacy but not leadership competence. Paradoxically, however, while leadership cannot be taught, leadership can be learned. Men and women become leaders by practice, by performing deliberate acts of leadership. The primary role of a good leader (one who is competent and ethical) is to establish and reinforce values and purpose, develop vision and strategy, build community, and initiate appropriate organizational change. This behavior requires character, creativity, and compassion, core traits that cannot be acquired cognitively.Practical implicationsFor those charged with the responsibility of developing leaders, the three necessary steps are to select the right candidates, create learning challenges, and provide mentoring. Those who seek to develop effective leadership training programs must first establish a metric for assessing leadership effectiveness. They must then design experiments that can establish a causal or statistically significant relationship between training initiatives and leadership competency. Evidence suggests that the most effective leadership programs will focus on building self‐knowledge and skills in rhetoric and critical thinking.Originality/valueThis paper challenges the utility of most leadership training. Leadership cannot be taught, although potential leaders can be educated.

plethora of guidance awaits managers seeking to become better leaders, but much of the advice is based on questionable evidence, most of it anecdotal. Leading academics don't even agree on what constitutes leadership or which leadership practices can be successfully emulated. In the endless avalanche of self-help books on leadership there are recommendations for how to become a leader, behave like a leader, train other leaders, be a pack leader, a change leader, a mentor leader, a Zen leader, a tribal leader, a platoon leader, an introverted leader or a triple-crown leader. The popular press offers us myriad case histories of leaders from Steve Jobs to the captain of the ''best damned ship in the US Navy'' that showcase an example of success, formulate a set of principles based on it and prescribe those practices for leaders everywhere. None of the books I've seen, however, takes the next step and describes how managers who adopted the recommended practices fared as compared with their competitors who did not. Despite this lack of proof of efficacy, managers' continuing need and appetite for leadership advice propels a massive market. Amazon offers almost 60,000 different books on the leader and over 80,000 on leadership, a more than six-fold increase over the past ten years. Google cites millions of references to leaders and leadership, and their recent Ngram analysis shows that the term ''leader'' has appeared in the literature from 1990 to 2008 almost 50 percent more often than the term ''manager''-and ten times more often than the term ''follower.'' Some working definitions Still, despite this deluge, we lack a Grand Unifying Theory, a tested leadership paradigm that identifies the source code or essence of leaders and a definition of the conditions that produce leadership. So we have to make do with working definitions of leadership, which include: B The early simplistic paradigm (leadership is good management). B The semantic description (leadership is the process of leading). B The transactional definition (leadership is a social exchange between leaders and followers). B The situational notion (leadership is a phenomenon that precedes and facilitates decisions and actions). B The esthetic concept (leadership is an art or a craft).

ver the past few years, the media has chronicled the misadventures of a mugbook full of corporate scoundrels. Some of the notables making lurid headlines were Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron executives, Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, and convicted WorldCom chief executive Bernard J. Ebbers. But should these scandals make us reflect on the wider problems of corporate leadership? True, such convicted malefactors total just a small percentage of the Fortune 500. But there are also many CEOs who have been forced to resign in recent years because they failed leadership 101, and a scandal involving the backdating of options has raised questions about the judgment of even remarkable leaders like Steve Jobs of Apple. As one indication of the widespread climate of disenchantment with leadership, Business Week now publishes a feature on the year's ''worst leaders.''[1] So it's not clear whether we're witnessing an epidemic of misbehavior, or merely watching corporate leadership under more intensive scrutiny in the post Sarbanes-Oxley environment. But in either case, several fundamental questions need to be answered. They include: Why aren't bad leaders recognized long before they bring woe to shareholders? Why isn't the process of anticipating who will be a good leader failsafe? And how can organizations deal with a brilliant candidate who obviously lacks important leadership skills but seems to be capable of delivering impressive results?

InnoCentive, which connects a virtual global community of 50,000 highly quali®ed scientists with client companies seeking solutions to high-tech problems (www.innoCentive.com). InnoCentive, located in Andover, Massachusetts, is pioneering two new strategic management processes ± managing open innovation and co-creating unique value with customers (seè`C o-creating unique value with customers'' by C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in

PurposeClassifying and evaluating the central ideas of strategic management (the basic tools for managers) is an ambitious project. Judging them by their impact, utility, and longevity, this study selected ten big ideas.Design/methodology/approachThe author, who has 40 years of experience with large US, Canadian and Puerto Rican firms, reviewed the literature and interviewed a number of senior practitioners to collect current opinions.FindingsThe article should spur discussions among researchers and practitioners about alternative big ideas that belong on their own most‐significant list.Practical implicationsThis list is valuable to practitioners who want to become familiar with and use a full range of strategic management tools and analytic options.Originality/valueThe evaluations of the strategic management tools and techniques are up to date and are based on practical experience.