What Makes a Good Leader? Leadership comes in many shapes and
sizes, and often from entirely unexpected quarters. In this
excerpt from the HBS Bulletin, five HBS professors weigh in with
their views on leadership in action. When discussing business
leadership, the distinction between good management and good
leadership is often made. Managers are thought to be the
budgeters, the organizers, the controllers — the ants, as one
observer puts it — while leaders are the charismatic, big-
picture visionaries, the ones who change the whole ant farm. But
such a construction, those interviewed for this article agree,
erroneously leads to a bimodal way of looking at something that
should really be evaluated on two separate scales. "Everybody
has got a little bit of each in them," says John Kotter, who
admits he is sometimes guilty of using the dichotomy in an
effort at simplification. "It's much better to think in terms of
measuring people on a zero-to-ten scale for each quality." HBS
professor Joe Badaracco agrees that