Leadership in the new world
Leadership is the capacity to initiate a future distinct from the past. This is what distinguishes leadership from management. Management is the capacity to give order and structure in service of high performance. Management is not burdened with an act of creation, it is about operationalizing goals and objectives.
A distinct future can only be achieved through high engagement. We can say then that the essence of leadership is about convening, valuing relatedness, and decentralizing its own role. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have.
Peter Block, from a recent article, Reconstructing Our Idea of Leadership
