Tens of thousands of books have been written on leadership and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies . Perhaps the most definitive review and integration of the leadership literature was Bass and Stogdill's 1,200-page Handbook of Leadership , which was published in 1990 (and still does the best job of making sense of the literature, for my money). And if you really want a long book on leadership, you can get the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership , which at 2,120 pages weighs in at 15 pounds, and costs a whopping $800.

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But of course, the point of...

My experience as a manager – and in particular, as the leader of a company – has been shaped by two quotes that have helped frame my thinking about that role. One is from Harold Geneen, who oversaw the growth of ITT into the first modern conglomerate:

“The skill of management is achieving your objectives through the efforts of others.”

This view of management suggests the classic manager, somebody who figures out what needs to be done and who needs to do it. I appreciate this concept -- because the skill of management is indeed achieving your objectives through the effort of others. But I’ve also worked within the framing of another quote, this one from Edwin Schlossberg, about writing.

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

The idea behind this – that leadership entails a responsibility to create an opportunity for others -- has really shaped my thinking because most of my leadership experience has been in running a company. And that role is largely about seeing the potential in people and projects, and creating a context...

I’m a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. If there’s a better recipe for creating prosperity I haven’t seen it.

So why do fewer than four out of ten consumers in the developed world believe that large corporations make a “somewhat” or “generally” positive contribution to society? (This according to a 2007 study by McKinsey & Company .) Why is it that only 19% of Americans tell pollsters they have “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in big business? (In the 2010 Gallup survey , only Congress scored worse.) It seems that a majority of us expect big companies to behave badly—to ravish the environment, exploit employees and mislead customers. When it comes to feckless irresponsibility, big business seems to be in the same league as Tiger Woods and Lindsay Lohan.

Some blame Wall Street for this state of affairs. In March 2009, the Financial Times claimed that the “credit crisis had destroyed faith in the free market ideology that has dominated Western thinking for...

Editor's note: You can follow Vineet Nayar on twitter at @vineetnayar .

I’ve often wondered about the book ‘Nice girls don’t make the corner office’ by Dr Lois P Frankel. The author cautions women that their careers could get sabotaged by “girlish behaviour” learned in childhood, such as working non-stop without a break, worrying about offending others, backing down too easily, explaining too much when asked for information or “polling” friends and colleagues before making a decision…

Just as I get concerned when women are stereotyped in the workplace, I worry when women in turn typecast the work environment and how they must change to succeed in it.

And then I look around at my own organization HCL with a sigh of relief. Looking at all our successful women leaders completely oblivious of such hypotheses as they go about their daily routine, I can quote Bollywood director Raju Hirani’s popular line without hesitation and declare: “All is well.”

Today I would like to profile one such woman leader in our organization. A woman who loves what she does and successfully integrates this passion and her own character into her work. While the narrative...

Emergent social software platforms — the enabling technologies of the 2.0 Era — are being deployed by enterprises at a rapid rate. Companies as varied as Microsoft, Spigit, Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, and IBM now all offer enterprise social offerings for customers.

This brings up an important question: what are Enterprise 2.0 best practices for individuals? Should an employee use her company's social networking software just like she uses her Facebook account? Should she microblog the same way she uses Twitter?

I say no. Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0; corporate technologies are different than personal ones, even if they look and feel the same. They're there to support the work of the organization, not to let individuals do and say whatever they want.

As I've argued for some time, though, there's no deep incompatibility between these two use cases. The autonomous and personalized actions and interactions of people, facilitated by technology, can be a great benefit to the enterprise, because this work creates new knowledge and fosters novel connections.

So here are some recommendations about how to use these tools to simultaneously advance your own work, make your...

Gary Hamel : What does it mean for an organization to be open?

Henry Chesbrough : I came to open from seeing what happened to organizations that were closed. One formative insight came from watching Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center. There was all this phenomenal stuff that came out of these research labs at Xerox -- the mouse, the...