Leaders do the right thing.
So many books on leadership have been published in the last 10 years that you might think it a recent discovery. They reflect a growing realisation that there are learnable leadership disciplines that can be applied at all corporate levels. But the awakening goes back much more than 10 years and probably has much to do with the effect of 20th century mass warfare on ordinary people. The theory had been popularised in the Victorian era by Thomas Carlyle and had a willing audience among the great tycoons of the age. This rags to riches ideal was popularised in Horatio Alger novels that drew a big readership among American boys between the wars.