Leadership in Action: Issues and Observations—The Full Nelson—Leadership Lessons from a British Naval Hero

Issues & Observations: The Full Nelson: Leadership Lessons from a British Naval Hero

David Hurst

The heroic model of leadership, in which great accomplishments in the corporate world are attributed to single individuals, is alive and well in the popular business press despite the fact that for the past ten years this model has been disparaged by management academics and consultants alike. These academics and consultants now advocate a more situational, distributed view, in which leadership is no longer seen as a bundle of traits possessed by a single leader but as a complex process occurring among leaders and followers at many levels of an organization and in a variety of contexts.

In the public arena, however, the popular vision of the heroic ...