Organizational cultures are disengaging because managers hog all the ownership. They compete for advancement by being goal scorers, solution generators. Thus they want to own the best solutions, develop their own answers and just use employees to execute their visions. No wonder employees feel like passengers on the bus.

Theories of management range from academic discussions of planning, organizing and controlling to the detailed descriptions of how managers actually work, an approach championed by Henry Mintzberg ever since his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work and updated in his recent book, Managing. But both approaches share a common assumption - that should study managers in formal management roles to understand leadership. If, instead, we examine management as an activity in which anyone can engage we can develop a much different picture of management.

Leadership needs to be reinvented as a one-off act, abandoning its current obsession with its role-based associations. This is necessary to account for leadership as shown by creative class employees who show leadership by challenging the status quo and promoting a better way rather than by climbing the ladder or by taking charge of others. The main benefits of this change are greater employee engagement and innovation.

Leaders who work with people of different nationalities must learn to accept differences in culture to truly break all barriers that will hinder good working relations.

Leadership as conventionally conceived is disempowering because it is paternalistic. We are far too dependent on leaders to have some special insight into the future. Organizations need to cast off their outdated concept of leadership if they want to reap the full power of employee creativity.