What a great concept. I am a part of a number of both concentric circles and webs through my coaching practice. As a well seasoned(retired)business executive, I enjoy sharing my experiences with leaders who want to improve their performance.

My Philosophy ?

What makes any person a leader is his or her ability to set goals and ACHIEVE DESIRED RESULTS - nothing more, nothing less.

This view resembles Confucius' concept of self-honesty coming before other forms of honesty, and expanding out in terms of those one has power over and with, and then to all the moral examples one emulates. It's got tradition behind it, certainly.

But it doesn't go far enough to deal with the difference between leadership (dealing with change and making processes effective in changing times) and management (dealing with complexity and making things efficient when they aren't changing much). Very often, choosing the wrong template or example for the times is fatal to the organization. To emulate stolid traditionalists at a time when the industry or field one is in happens to be undergoing massive change... well you get the idea.

Where the Gergen/Confucian notion of socially defined circles works is for picking up ethical and other regulatory circles from one's environment, remaining aware of what is OK and not OK with those people, so as never to be the worst of them, and never excluded for moral depravity.

For instance, business activities that people would have shrugged their shoulders at a few years ago are now considered abhorrent: using products of rainforest destruction in production, selling textiles made with child labour, benefitting very directly from dealings with people oppressing aboriginal peoples. The flourishing of standard labels, like "No Old Growth", "Fair Trade Coffee", "Conflict-Free Diamonds", "No Sweat", "Forestry Stewardship Council approved", and so on, are a sign that leadership, today, is more about which auditing schemes you choose to embrace.

Heck, Wal-Mart is planning to be the world's largest vendor of organic food, and Home Depot no longer stocks old growth wood. Think about it. You can emulate Jane Goodall or you can emulate Gus Kouwenhoven, and your company will turn out being welcome in one set of circles, or another, depending on which you choose.

Gergen has described the essential element of true leadership that most don't know how to define. My philosphy is that leadership is not about setting goals and achieving them, creating change or making processes effective or the like. Those are some of the results of good leadership, not elements required for leadership.

Leadership is an intrinsic phenomena that starts with self and that results in extrinsic results created through vision, inspiration, living integrity, and the belief in execution.

The use of concentric circles and the web paint the picture better than any other example I have seen or heard. Leadership is not something that that someone does at work. True leadership is who they are at all times and is something impacts the world aroung us in ways that we will never know. The beautiful thing is that it all starts with one small circle - the leader him or herself, not the company, not the environment, not society, the person.