Is your organisation run by a general and you are a soldier in his army? Or is your CEO the conductor and you are a musician in the orchestra? These styles of leadership are two of the archetypes identified by Jim Quigley, the CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, who hosted a breakfast where he launched As One, a book he has co-authored on how to organise collective leadership.

"There is no single answer for everyone, but we have developed eight archetypes of different kinds of collaborative leadership," said Quigley.

"One organisation may use one archetype for one task, and another for a different style of job."

Quigley has taken these different styles of leadership into what he calls the ‘As One' approach which identifies three factors that are vital to making an organisation succeed. These are shared identity, which allows people to connect with their organisation; directional intensity, which focuses on people's commitment to the organisation's goals; and common interpretation, which is about people's understanding of how work should be done.

Common goal

"Leadership matters," said Quigley, "but it is not all about the personality traits of the leader. This is because so much leadership now has shifted from the former command and control model, in which the leader ordered and the troops delivered, to a much more collaborative style of leadership, in which a cohesive group of people work together effectively towards a common goal."

At the same breakfast, the co-CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott, explained how he manages to share the job of CEO with another co-CEO. Together they run a large and successful multinational.

"SAP works because we all share a single vision which is ‘How do we make the world run better?' The most important thing is that we all share that idea, so that the software programmer at his keyboard, and the salesman talking to a customer are on the same wavelength," said McDermott.

He commented that far too many companies are internally focused: "People compare the ‘now' they are working in with the past of their own company. But they have to know that they do not serve the boss, but they serve the customer."

McDermott also said they are very open with numbers and ideas, so that the whole staff can work to the one vision effectively.

"Leadership is not about controlling numbers or the information flow. It is about getting out there and talking with people."

In an agglutinative world where words are smashed together to build a new meaning, Sarah Palin can ‘refudiate' by mixing refute and repudiate; and others can have ‘frenemies' who are those smiling friends who are just waiting for a weak moment to stick the knife in.

But now the normally frighteningly coherent Larry Summers of Harvard University has fallen in with the new trend by describing the relationship between China and the US as ‘coopetition', in which the two competing countries nonetheless need to cooperate. It turns out that this neologism has been around for almost 100 years, but restricted to business theory to describe competing companies which need to cooperate in some areas.

To hear it being used in Davos shocked some of the CCTV audience, and amused the others, but all agreed that this is what China and the US need to do, although the verdict is still out on how they will achieve this happy result.

Only a government with moral authority could take the army out of politics and put it back to where it should be, said Imran Khan, the president of Pakistani opposition party Tehreek e Insaf. He was speaking at a lunch hosted by Ikram Seghal, Chairman of G4S, and Khan commented that the only politicians in Pakistan's history that could have done it were the country's founding president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who unfortunately died too soon to follow through with all his ideas; or Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he first took power with a popular mandate for reform, but his government failed to follow though on this issue.

Khan was scathing about the moral authority of the 11 years of democratic governments before General Musharraf's military coup, saying that both sides were corrupt and unable to tell the army what to do. He was no less scathing about the present government.

He pointed to the example of Turkey, where a civilian government with a popular mandate was able to reform the Turkish constitution and force the army to drop its former constitutional role as guardian of the state. "No one would have thought that it could have the moral authority to put the army into the right place," said Khan.