The article is a powerful writing for calibrating your role as a leader or manager of an organization and offers a wide spectrum of elements of leadership one can develop to make yourself an asset to your organization. The article expresses successful leaders as people who don't make plans; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with just having "charisma “or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Leadership is about coping with change. More change always demands more leadership. Since the function of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to leadership. Setting direction is never the same as planning or even long-term planning. The more that change characterizes the business environment, the more that leaders must motivate people to provide leadership as well. When this works, it tends to reproduce leadership across the entire organization, with people occupying multiple leadership roles throughout the hierarchy. This is highly valuable, because coping with change in any complex business demands initiatives from a multitude of people. Nothing less will work.

One aspect of leadership is to first decrypt the differences and similarities between leaders and managers. Leaders are not rare people with exceptional charisma necessarily and that there is no hierarchy that exists where one is more important than the other. The author says that that these two roles should complement one another in their focus and that they are different entities with differing roles in an organization that are interdependent. While many people can play roles as leaders in an organization, it is the duty of management to help guide the group through rough patches and while this involves leadership skills, leading can come from beyond this managerial role from within members of the organization who can be leaders in the sense that they are open to changes and can adapt and help others do the same while management works in terms of organizing and leader work “aligning” people with new directions. Since constant change and evolution are such important parts of the success of an organization, having a balance between the aligning influences of the leaders in the organization and the management-based duties of organization and assistance with stability through the change, is vital. Kotter points out