Title: Learning from historical periods: zeitgeist correlations between environment, leadership, and strategy

Authors: Vikram Murthy, David McKie

Addresses: Hargraves Institute, Sydney, Australia Managed Innovation Limited, Sydney, Australia. ' Department of Management Communication, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Abstract: This paper posits that a firm|s strategy, leadership responses and processes are correlated to specific environments, with characteristics that broadly correlate with different eras. It suggests how theories of leadership styles, which have emerged as a consequence of environmental changes, can augment understanding of contextually related trends. It examines how these cluster around transactional leadership, transformational or new-leadership, and new new-leadership and argues that this clustering has an involuntary, but deleterious, loss of focus on significant alternative leadership perspectives of particular contemporary relevance. To incorporate these developments, this paper proposes a leadership repertoire, which it calls the |ensemble leadership| approach.

Keywords: environment; transactional; transformational; new-new leadership; ensemble leadership; mindfulness; virtuousness; world-citizenry; connectedness; business strategy; leadership styles.

DOI: 10.1504/WREMSD.2008.020116

World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, 2008 Vol.4 No.4, pp.331 - 344

Published online: 26 Aug 2008 *

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