CHAPTER 48
FIND YOUR CONTEXT
Leaders used to be leaders. If you could lead anything, you could lead everything. Not that there was much choice: if you were born to be king, you were born to lead.
Leadership has changed. Leading in one organisation is no guarantee of success in another organisation. If a football manager, conductor and CEO all swapped roles the results would be entertaining more than they would be productive. Leadership has become a much more specialised skill. Leaders succeed in the context they know: take them out of context and they struggle. You may as well ask a cow to play the violin.
And yet the myth of the all-purpose leader survives. Governments in particular like to hire ex-CEOs in the hope that some private sector pixie ...
