As business practitioners grapple with the
intangible yet potentially valuable notion of ethical leadership, it is left to
scholars to assess whether those practitioners are “coloring within the lines.”
It is admittedly all too easy to draw in exogenous material that is pleasing to
the eye; it is all too easy to deem such material required for ethical
leadership rather than ballast weighing it down, unnecessarily. One
business practitioner characterizes ethical leadership as that which “inspires
the behaviors in people necessary to create competitive advantage.” As
achieving a sustainable competitive advantage is the task of strategy, inspiration
alone can be extracted as that which is particular to leadership. Strategy is
what is left once one has extracted inspiration from the characterization.
