The message delivered by educational organizations can be summarized, roughly, as follows:

Spanish-speaking Browns,

we do not need a lot of autocratic “experts,” but rather people who think of their jobs as providing leadership in some technical area, even though the people they have to lead do not report to them.

Effective leadership in a job that includes a complicated set of lateral relationships requires, first, a keen sense of where those relationships are.

Young employees, in particular, often naïvely assume that “good performance speaks for itself,” which then leads them to undercommunicate with their superiors. That is, as long as they think they are doing a good job and that there are really no problems, they tend to communicate little with their bosses.

worked with key marketing personnel to identify some unambiguous measures of short-term marketing performance, so as to avoid later arguments about how well they were doing,

Altering predispositions toward authority, especially at the extremes, is almost impossible without intensive psychotherapy (psychoanalytic theory and research suggest that such predispositions are deeply rooted in a person’s personality and upbringing).

people can be taught to make a realistic self-assessment, to assess opportunities competently, and then to make intelligent choices.

the type of knowledge that is particularly important in leadership jobs is not the kind one finds in books or in educational programs. It is detailed information about the social reality in which the job is imbedded.