• Terry Barber in Forbes magazine urges businesses to think more like a not-for-profit.
• John Baldoni on the Harvard business blog explains why we must not let our ego stop us from learning.
• The Economist on the latest thinking on executive pay.
• Neat little observation from Seth Godin on the difference between marketing and sales.

Are there board benefits to breaking male hegemony?

Boards composed entirely of white males can damage their businesses by indulging in narrow “groupthink”, according to Helen Alexander, who is expected to become the first female president of the CBI, the UK employers’ organisation. Is this true? And if so, how do companies overcome it?

Continue reading: Judgment call: are there board benefits to breaking male hegemony?

• Fortune magazine on where MBA graduates want to work
• And Business Week continues the debate on the future of B-schools
• Bob Sutton writes about baboons and bosses (enough already with the monkeys?!)
• Tammy Erickson tells Gen Y graduates: take a gap year!

Is management ultimately just an elaborate waste of time? This might sound like a career-limiting question for a management writer to ask. But I am forced to think the unthinkable after reading a new book, called Management Rewired, by the US consultant Charles Jacobs (which I have reviewed here).

The author makes some startling assertions. “The managers who produce the best results are the ones who do the least managing,” he says. “The biggest challenge is for managers to stop doing most of what they’re doing now.”

Mr Jacobs bases his approach on the discoveries made by neuroscientists in recent years. He argues that, now we know so much more about how the brain works, we need to move on from the standard management practices which, he says, are ill-suited to human beings, given the way we react to the world around us.

As animals, our emotional responses are more powerful than our rational ones, he says. Logic evolved later. Cool, rational feedback is bound to upset people. Appraisals are basically destructive.

“When it comes to organising large numbers of people, we’ll get better results if, rather than trying to thwart their natural inclinations, we just accept how people behave and make the most of it,” Mr Jacobs writes. Currently, management is “more suited to forms of life lacking the ability to think.”

Blimey. My rational, logical side wants to disagree (we need order, not chaos!). But perhaps that’s just because my inner chimpanzee is feeling threatened. I’ll have a banana, and think about it…

• Tom Davenport considers the role of the chief performance officer.
• Forbes magazine on the wave of introspection at the business schools.
• And economists are worried too. Wharton faculty on why they missed the warning signs of impending disaster.
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter on three little words every leader should learn: “I was wrong.”

Decisive. But even-handed. Confident. But not arrogant. A front runner. But also a team player. A leader. But a manager, too.

We expect a lot from people who hold positions of leadership. There is no shortage of books on the subject, and no sign that the supply will ever dry up.

Leaders are often portrayed as lonely individuals, taking decisions in isolation which colleagues must either take or leave. It is a false, but seductive, picture, an oversimplified account of something far more subtle, and complicated.

In Leadership Without Easy Answers (1998), Ron Heifetz - who will be profiled in this Saturday’s FT - pointed out that leadership should not be seen as the responsibility of a single individual. Problems can be complicated and “adaptive”, not simply technical. Authoritarian approaches may not work.

In Leadership On The Line (2002), Heifetz and his colleague Martin Linsky argued that leadership can be perilous: “To lead is to live dangerously because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear – their daily habits, tools, loyalties, and ways of thinking…” they wrote. “People push back when you disturb the personal and institutional equilibrium they know. And people resist in all kinds of creative and unexpected ways that can get you taken out of the game.”

In spite of the dramatic collapse, from “hero to zero”, of several famous business leaders in recent months, still we focus overwhelmingly on chief executives, waiting for the next hero to emerge for us to place our trust in. Away from business, President Obama is the latest heroic role model to provide inspiring leadership. But if and when he fails we will find another figure to replace him.

Life has changed, and leaders need to change too. The writer Michael Maccoby points out, in The Leaders We Need (2007), that “People today respond to different qualities in leaders than they did a generation ago.”

We still want to look up to our leaders, but we don’t want to have to crane our necks too far. As Jay Conger, a professor of leadership at Claremont McKenna college in California once put it: “We need leaders with shorter legs.”

The current issue of the Harvard Business Review contains a rare piece of commentary from a serving chief executive, Procter & Gamble’s AG Lafley. His article is called “What only the CEO can do”. It contains a run-down of the key tasks and responsibilities that fall to the organisation’s most senior manager.

Mr Lafley should be congratulated for sticking his head above the parapet and engaging in debate. Not enough CEOs do this. But then, not too many of them would be able to marshal an argument in such an interesting way.

Luckily I was able to follow up with “AG” on the phone last week. It turns out that in writing this piece P&G’s boss was repaying a long-standing debt to the late Peter Drucker. “I went to see him two or three times a year towards the end of his life,” Mr Lafley explained. “I committed to turning his notes into something.” After nine years in the CEO’s chair, he feels able to answer the question that Drucker used to put to him: what is the work of the CEO?

The central task, Mr Lafley argues, is to link the outside world with what is going on inside the corporation. This involves four main challenges. First, making sure that the voice of the consumer is heard loudest and clearest of all, above that of any other stakeholder. Second, deciding what business you are in – and equally, what businesses you should not be in. “People don’t volunteer to exit a business,” Mr Lafley told me. “That’s one of my jobs: to weed the garden.”

Third, balancing the need for performance in the short term with the need to invest for the longer term – “we err on the side of investing in the long term,” Mr Lafley said, “in fact we’re more like a Japanese company than a western one in that regard.” And fourth, the CEO has to shape values and standards. The values have to be connected to the realities of the outside world. “At P&G we’re purpose driven and values led,” Mr Lafley writes in his HBR article.

Only the CEO can achieve these tasks, he argues. This is what leadership means. Setting an example (Mr Lafley spends hours with customers all over the world on “in-home” visits). And never forgetting that you are being watched closely by all your colleagues.

“Employees are watching you even when you think you can’t be seen,” Mr Lafley says. The hugely successful turnaround of the Cincinnati-based giant since Mr Lafley’s arrival in 2000 would suggest that this is one CEO well worth watching.