The popular business press on both sides of the Atlantic is infatuated with chief executive officers who have drunk from the Holy Grail of heroic leadership. To be sure, a single person can make a difference at times, but even such heroic CEOs as General Electric's Jack Welch emphasize the power of team leadership in action. As Welch himself said, "We've developed an incredibly talented team of people running our major businesses, and, perhaps more important, there's a healthy sense of collegiality, mutual trust, and respect for performance that pervades this organization."

Increasingly, the top team is essential to the success of the enterprise. Indeed, Welch is celebrated not only for increasing GE's revenues nearly sevenfold in his 20-year tenure but also for building one of the world's strongest executive talent portfolios, which has provided new leadership for many Fortune 500 companies besides GE.

So despite the obsessions of the business press, senior executives, shareholders, and boards of directors question the myth of heroic leadership. Merely bringing in a new CEO to reshape an organization will tend to show mixed results; in the consumer goods companies analyzed in Exhibit 1, for example, they were always worse after the arrival of...