Learning from historical periods: zeitgeist correlations between environment, leadership, and strategy

This paper posits that a firm's strategy, leadership responses and processes are correlated to specific environments, with characteristics that broadly correlate with different eras. It suggests how theories of leadership styles, which have emerged as a consequence of environmental changes, can augment understanding of contextually related trends. It examines how these cluster around transactional leadership, transformational or new-leadership, and new new-leadership and argues that this clustering has an involuntary, but deleterious, loss of focus on significant alternative leadership perspectives of particular contemporary relevance. To incorporate these developments, this paper proposes a leadership repertoire, which it calls the 'ensemble leadership' approach.