In reviews of leadership writings and research, Bob Sutton kept bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged him: leading versus managing. Rather than rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, he says that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management. At a minimum, they lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management.

Today’s world requires a new breed of agile leaders. Research reveals that leaders develop agility by moving through five hierarchical stages: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Cocreator, and Synergist.

Recently, Bob Sutton posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now he's following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the third belief: "Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day."

Leaders are increasingly finding themselves in situations where they need help from subordinates, and in which subordinates are asking for help in areas where leaders are not experts. To manage either situation effectively, a leader will have to develop a degree of humility and specific process skills. Readers will learn how to achieve those difficult goals in this article by the dean of organizational behavior.

In every company, there are really two organizations at work: the informal and the formal. High-performance companies mobilize their informal organizations while maintaining and adding formal structures, balancing the two.

Recently, Bob Sutton posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now he's following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the second belief: "My success — and that of my people — depends largely on my being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods."

Many leaders fail to effectively tap in to the knowledge and experience of their team. Executive and leadership coach John M. McKee says this is like working with one hand tied behind the back. In this article, he shares questions any leader can use to improve results and morale.

What is leadership? What must a person do to become a true leader or to turn others into true leaders?

Does knowing leadership personally, reflecting on it intellectually, and experiencing it intimately make leadership easy to understand? No.

As a subject of scholarly inquiry, leadership—and who leaders are, what makes them tick, how they affect others—has been neglected for decades. The Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, edited by Harvard Business School's Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, brings together some of the best minds on this important subject. Q&A with Khurana, plus book excerpt.

In recent years, GE has faced severe business challenges -- the company's $200 billion market cap is half of what it used to be. Still, an area of enormous strength is the way the company identifies and builds leaders. Much of the credit goes to GE's corporate learning programs, executed through a learning facility in Crotonville, N.Y. As business becomes more global, how is leadership development at GE changing? How does GE use technology to teach leadership? What impact will the influx of the Facebook generation have on the way leadership is taught? Susan Peters -- GE's chief learning officer and vice president for executive development -- discussed these questions and more with Knowledge@Wharton.

I understand that you may be trying to start a company and build a website on a shoe string budget.

You may think that you are saving money by hiring an individual or a small Web design shop to create your website.

You may think that you are getting a real deal because the individual or tiny shop happens to be highly creative and truly talented.

You may think that you are saving money by not having an IP attorney review the contract, if any.

You may think that you own the website design and logo that you paid to have designed. Your Web designer may even tell you that you do.

You may think that the contract that the Web designer gives you really assigns the copyright to you because it vaguely talks about ownership and copyrights in the same paragraph.

You may think that your Web designer will understand copyright law and not rip off other sites and put infringing material on your site.

YOU MAY BE VERY, VERY WRONG!

How the military can help you learn from your mistakes.

Find a bright spot and clone it.

That's the first step to fixing everything from addiction to corporate malaise to malnutrition. A problem may look hopelessly complex. But there's a game plan that can yield movement on even the toughest issues. And it starts with locating a bright spot -- a ray of hope.

The “vision thing” is still with us, but while leaders insist in having a compelling vision, the fact is that many – both the leaders and the visions – leave people standing still, unmoved. A leader who engages stakeholders when developing a vision will, in the end, articulate one that resonates strongly and impels people to act.

Individuals don’t have to be well-rounded, but teams should be.

One of the most startling conclusions of Gallup's research is that there is no one strength that all good leaders possess. What's more, the most effective leaders are not well-rounded at all, but instead are acutely aware of their talents and use them to their best advantage.

The colossal business failures of the past few years underscore the fact that the conduct of a company’s leadership team is directly correlated with the organization’s long-term performance. Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams. And just as business failures can be traced back to the conduct of the leadership team, so can business success. High-performing leadership teams breed high-performance companies.

Without an awareness of your strengths, it's almost impossible for you to lead effectively. We all lead in very different ways, based on our talents and our limitations. Serious problems occur when we think we need to be exactly like the leaders we admire. Doing so takes us out of our natural element and practically eliminates our chances of success.

Power diminishes perception and perspective: Why are some managers seemingly incapable of understanding their subordinates’ points of view? Adam Galinsky finds that high-power individuals anchor too heavily on their own perspectives and demonstrate a diminished ability to correctly perceive the perspective of others.

Want to ascend to a true leadership role? Be prepared to let go of what you're good at.

The diversity of identities and personalities in today’s knowledge workplace complicates a leader’s task. However, knowing what factors shaped and still influence those identities can help a leader understand – and predict – why certain personalities behave in certain ways. Made aware and sensitized, a leader comes to respect those identities. In turn, followers come to respect the leader.

One of the realities of corporate life is that there is only so much face time, airtime, meeting time, and thinking time available to those who lead organizations. You can have influence only to the extent that people take time out of their busy days to listen to you and pay attention to your advice. As the author has discovered, there is an art to giving advice.

Many CEOs are naturally inclined - and responsible for - overseeing the day-to-day operations of their respective firms. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but in the years ahead, one of a company's major competitive advantages will be its ability to attract, develop, excite and retain talent. Responsibility for managing that talent is already being assumed by some CEOs, who, these co-authors and McKinsey consultants say, are fast coming to the realization that their respective organizations are going to have to improve their talent management practices. In this article, which is based on their recently published book, The War for Talent, the co-authors survey the state of talent management as practiced by 13,000 managers. While becoming a talent manager is imperative, it will require a fundamental shift in how a CEO sees his or her job and a significant time commitment, tasks that the authors describe in the article.

Leadership becomes more urgent than ever in a downturn, and ensuring an adequate supply of leaders in the roles where they can make the most difference remains a vital priority. Closing leadership gaps and building a talent-rich organization requires careful planning.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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The inventory tool is the companion to the book The Amaryllis Way - Growing Leaders Who Grow Leaders, a leadership parable that describes a philosophy of leadership. The inventory tool builds on the concepts from the book and seeks to identify your leadership approach. It is designed to help you and members of your team reflect on how you grow people or where you may be deficient. With a healthy dose of honesty, it can provide insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and establish a basis for discussing how to develop people as leaders and as members of a team.