The metaphors of leadership have changed. We probably liked the Gulf War because the last vestiges of a traditional, historical style of leadership were present. The truth is, most dead-ahead, confrontational strategies are disastrous. Tacking, as in sailing, may be the more appropriate metaphor. Straight ahead may find us on the shoals and shipwrecked.
Hierarchical leadership calls up heroic images, but they have always been flawed.
Literature, history, art, have always told us that natural forces reclaim us through patterns, consequences and outcomes. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French writers have emphasized that most virtue or evil plays out in larger than life consequences. To a Balzac or a Flaubert, there were never any separated events. If Madame Bovary chose adultery, life-shaping contingent events and patterns would follow. Hamlet turned out to be indecisive, over-contemplative, frozen to act.