Hi Grady; good to see your smiling face as the last pre-trip online image.

I've never been one for carving things up, except for the value of the dialogue and common context sometimes needed through such carving. I tend to go to the academic literature to see the latest on what is being said there. I think the emphasis some academics put on these things has to do with "branding" and niche as much as substantive differences.

I've not mapped out the differences, but if I were to try to do this seriously, I would probably consider a couple of axes, which I'll name power and predictability for now.

I'll use "transformational" leadership as an example for power, though--in my view--it doesn't really fit what we are talking about here. Some people consider the transformational leadership paradigm as a way of distributing leadership, but it really is in the hands of someone with power to orchestrate this. So this sits relatively close to centralized power. Whereas "distributed" (though somewhat quietly and between the lines) recognizes that the ultimate form of distributed leadership is the total disappearance of the leader-follower paradigm.

I'm not sure predictability is a great axis, but just to play with it... Traditional leadership models often assume a lot of predictability. I would have to dig back into literature to see which of these makes that assumption (which is perfectly valid for some work, but does one need "collective" leadership for such work except perhaps for buy-in?) Some of these new models--such as complex and relational--acknowledge the unpredictability of much of our work. Of these two spectra, probably the unpredictable end is even more controversial than the give-away-power end.

I'll wave as we fly somewhere near Boston (unless we go over the pole).

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