The nature of leadership, at least beyond any simplistic caricature, is surely as an emergent pivot and catalyst for change. All members of an organisation are actors in this – the distributed leadership quotient – and the emergence of critical, decision-making nodes such as those we identify as “leaders” is perhaps merely an autonomous and reflexive activity of any non-trivially sophisticated organisational entity and integrated social or cultural (and economic) information or energy-processing system.

Do leaders shape organisations or do organisations shape leaders? Both conjectures are (simultaneously) true.