“While many of today’s leaders have lost their way due to moral and ethical missteps, just as many are facing a dead end due to their inability to see the big picture,” writes Peter Vajda. “These leaders are intelligent, but, unfortunately, not wise.”

We have lived through the age of ‘nice’: the phony smile, the smarmy front hiding the crook within, the welcome into the crocodile‘s lair of cheap credit and ‘can’t fail’ investments. Now, says Jonathan Littman, we’re about to enter an age of Serious Mean.

“The challenge for organizations today,” writes Peter Vajda, “is to carry out a redesign of their business models that sees it less as a mechanistic mix of processes, procedures and outcomes, and more like an ecosystem: part engineering, part quantum physics, part psychology, part biology, and part neuroscience.”

Which types of work demand possession of set credentials and which kinds demand being educated? Leaders cannot be produced merely by showing an understanding of certain knowledge and theories. The need for leadership begins at the point where established ways of doing things—the only ways you can teach—are found to be inadequate.

Top heavy organizations are often described as being ‘all chiefs and no indians’. Such a pattern has now become the norm throughout much of the Western world and it is probably why we have stumbled into our current mess. The only way out is to start again and find an approach that includes valuing the ‘indians’ as well.

Forget the pointless, academic arguments about the difference between leadership and management. What makes a situation need a true leader is probably rather simple. It also goes a long way towards explaining why so many ‘leaders’ have failed to cop with the current circumstances.

What can we learn from the mistakes so many of today’s high profile leaders made—the charismatic CEOs and ‘Masters of the Universe’ whose arrogance, greed and stupidity brought their whole edifice of folly and hubris crashing down on us, as well as them. What should we vow never, never to accept in any leader, ever again?

Kate Sweetman argues that leading an organization, especially in a downturn, means interacting with the people who are looking for guidance, and providing those folks with the truest picture the leader can draw about their collective future.

Competition clearly can be both a positive and a negative force. What makes the difference? Are there ways to recognize what produces the positive kind of competition and what gives the negative type?

Nina Simosko argues that reigniting growth when all today’s mess finally ends requires rethinking growth, not sinking back into what we fondly hope may be business as usual. By focusing on on value creation and identifying opportunities where you can impact the sustainability and resilience of your business, you will give yourself—and everyone else— the best chance.