“Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.” James MacGregor Burns wrote that in 1978. He was one of the most respected political scientists of his generation, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work on transformational leadership remains among the most cited in the field. If defining leadership was that difficult then, imagine attempting it today, in a world of remote teams, artificial intelligence, and organisations navigating change at a pace no single leader can fully comprehend.
And yet the question Burns was asking has not changed. What does effective leadership actually look like, and why do we keep getting it wrong?
