first principles all the way to plutarch and we said let's go back to the first to figure it out and we started studying it and the conclusion we came to was a little upsetting. that leadership is not what we think it is and it never has been. we have lived with this mythology of leadership. i grew up with a mother who loved pathologies as she read it to me all the time and i have a little book that she got when she was 5-years-old. one of the things i love you've gotin this muscular pathless standing on a mountain top in the sky the thing that was amazing for a long time, people accepted that. if you think about it that is a fine mythology that explains things for us and it simplifies things for us.

what we did was plutarch had written plutarch's lives where needed a series of pairings of greek and roman, romulus and theseus, founders. we wanted to look across the spectrum of leaders in different fields, backgrounds, diverse city. we wanted diversity of sex, diverse city of the nation, diversity of the field and whatnot so we came up with 6 genres. we came up with the geniuses, albert einstein and leonard bernstein. we came up with founders. walt disney, coco chanel. i didn't even know who coco chanel was when we started but i do now.we came up with powerbrokers, boss to, margaret thatcher. reformers, martin luther and the reformation and then his namesake, martin luther king jr. we came up with euros and the chinese admiral and we had a standalone. and the standalone was general robert e lee. we put robert e lee because of all the figures in my life and myyouth , he was the iconic leader. i went to washington high school, west point like robert e lee had. i live somebody from his boyhood home though for me, he was the exemplar of military and battlefield quality and leadership.

and yet we never thought we'd really got it so we went back to first principles all the way to plutarch and we said let's go back to the first to figure it out and we started studying it and the conclusion we came to was a little upsetting. that leadership is not what we think it is and it never has been. we have lived with this mythology of leadership. i grew up with a mother who loved pathologies as she read it to me all the time and i have a little book that she got when she was 5-years-old. one of the things i love you've gotin this muscular pathless standing on a mountain top in the sky the thing that was amazing for a long time, people accepted that. if you think about it that is a fine mythology that explains things for us and it simplifies things for us. first was formulaic myth. if you follow the list of behaviors or trades or that sort of things you are likely to be a good leader. when we studied it there were so many that were unsuccessful. what happens in the organization can usually be traced back to the leader. what happens in the organizational outcome is often only margi