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August 28, 2006

BOSS True Leaders list

August means leaders for AFR BOSS.

Each year in August BOSS publishes its True Leaders List. This year is the sixth edition of the list. One of the things it does for Spiral Path is to make us stop and think about how our feelings about leadership have developed over the last 12 months.

BOSS editor Helen Trinca wrote this year's piece. We think she adds an air of experience and ever so slightly deeper style than last year's author, Catherine Fox.

This year's piece nicely teases out the changes in perception of leadership over the last 12 months. Certainly, the panel believes the hero CEO is dead. We're not sure they're right about that, but it's nice to hear them say it.

The usual suspects are along with perhaps some surprises in Greg Combet and Noel Pearson.

Having shared some experiences with him more than a decade ago, we were very pleased to see quiet achiever Craig Winkler included in the top 25.

So how has Spiral Path's thinking about leadership changed over 12 months? Perhaps the greatest change is that we are less likely to think of leadership as a quality that some people have and others don't. We are more likely to think of leadership as something some people do in the situation they are in at the time and perhaps won't be able to in another situation. We think of David Loader, a visionary, inspiring and loved principal at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College. His experience at Wesley College was reported to be quite different.

We think True Leaders is useful in getting each of to think about what parts of ourselves we bring to our role as leaders. This, we believe, is the real work of a leader. Not useful, we think, is looking for qualities in other leaders that seem to make them 'successful' and then trying to emulate them.

Posted by chriscurnow at August 28, 2006 6:31 PM

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