I recently came across a fascinating video presentation by management expert, academic and author Gary Hamel. Hamel is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.

In the video, Hamel notes that today, leaders often appear to be coming up short. This is not an individual problem, he says: it is an organizational problem. Hamel feels that the essential problem is that our leaders – the people at the top of our organizations – are too busy to do everything they are required to do. In his words, we have built organizations that demand leaders with “the innovation and instincts of Steve Jobs, the political skills of Lee Kwan Yew, and the emotional intelligence of Desmond Tutu.” Such individuals, he notes dryly, are few and far between.

Hamel talks about how organizations need to restructure to meet the demands of the new creative economy – not only to more broadly syndicate the work that is increasingly expected of leaders, but also to reconsider how compensation is assigned so that it is no longer associated with hierarchy but rather with value.

He talks about how CEOs will need to “unleash the latent leadership across [their] organization[s],” step by step, and he provides examples of companies that have started to do that.

It is a fascinating video and I encourage you to take ten minutes to listen to it – or to check out the transcript of the interview that follows it on the McKinsey & Company page.

As always, I invite your comments, either via this blog or by emailing me directly.