ABSTRACT
In management literature nowhere is magico-mythical thinking more manifest than in the domain of leadership. It is this dominant way of understanding what leadership is, and what leaders do, which partly explains the way that job advertisements come to be worded similarly, and thus why candidates for leadership posts come to describe themselves in the way they do. The author have remarked before on the tendency for conventional management theory to separate out the experience of managing into dualistic poles. It can also be critical of the ways in which the current discourse on leadership leads us into magico-mythical thinking where insubstantial nonsense is presented as though it were rational common sense. His suggestion was that we should spend the first session defining what we meant by leadership, agreeing it, then working out what that might mean for practice.
