Having spent a whole day with Dr Stephen Covey (The 7 habits of highly effective people author) organised through my work in Melbourne last month, I would consider her line of thinking a bit pessimistic/ academic jargon (jumping on the pessimistic bandwagon post subprime crisis).
Dr Covey is an institution in himself and the most widely read author on the subject of leadership and management in the living history.
The underlying quality in his opinion of a leader is to stay positive and optimistic even in testy times and hence cultivate that culture for his employees and peers. Empowerment, creativity and optimism must become the hallmark of the organisations that excel and for those that survive in very troubled times.
He was of the view that the markets evolve and change, sometimes within months (due to the nature of our markets in information age) and mostly for factors outside anyone's control and being analytical and even remotely pessimistic thinking leads to "organisational lethargy" .
The following excerpt from the article is very ordinary. and from the "industrial age" line of business thinking..
[To illustrate, Tom Peters' Leadership offers an impossible, irreconcilable list of exhortations: Be a great salesman, great storyteller, great performer, networking fiend, talent fanatic, relationship maven, visionary, profit-obsessive, and (of course) an optimist. Push your organization; know when to wait; love mess, politics, and new technology; lead by winning people over; foster open communication; show respect; embrace the whole individual. Granted, Peters does give a couple of breaks — leaders get to be angry and make mistakes. But his list is all sizzle, no steak. Not only are his executives reluctant to say no — they don't develop any of the guts of what managing is really about: making decisions under uncertainty, creating routines, developing (not merely exhorting) direct reports, responding to crises, building in enough slack to deal with low-probability but high-consequence opportunities and risks.]
