In his book Kaizen , Masaaki Imai commented that American business managers tend to focus solely on results. While important, focusing too much on results will cause people to be more interested in changing the result than the processes that caused the result. Dr. Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , calls this the production and production capability balance. Effective leaders continually improve their production capability while also working to improve production. Neglecting either is a recipe for disaster.
Leadership is mainly a production capability item.
Good leaders improve their people's ability to produce, resulting in an empowered, happy work force. Quality programs that fail do so because of a lack of leadership and commitment. Every one of us can make a difference and be a leader. All it takes is constancy of purpose and commitment to continuous improvement. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed, but our power to do it is increased.