Siddhartha, Thank for the comment and the compliment about my writing.  Also, I appreciate your disagreement.  In fact, in my not-too-distant past I used to agree with your position.  However the point of my interest in leadership <em>is</em> values-oriented.  Effective leadership merely accomplishes the objective.  Hitler was effective, as was Jack Welch of GE, William Booth of the Salvation Army, Clara Barton of the Red Cross or Joseph Stalin of the USSR.

I feel our world needs to argue the value of actions.  Everything isn't relative in my world view.  Therefore I choose not to compromise on the definition of "good" because it's hard to determine.  If the benefit doesn't exceed the cost it's not good. (And you're right, I'm not suggesting this is merely financial.)  We've compromised for too long and now we can't tell what's good any more.  Effective, immoral leaders, as well as effective naive ones took advantage of our natural selfish tendencies and caused most of our world's greatest problems.  Maybe by discussing and debating the value of an action, we can eventually agree on more than just that Hitler and Stalin were bad.  Many people used to equate George W. Bush with Adolph Hitler.  That ended the debate rather than encouraged it.  I want to open the discussion.

Finally, this post was a bit of a response to a series posted by David Burkus called the <a href="http://theleaderlab.org/2010/04/the-maxwell-fallacy/" rel="nofollow">Maxwell Fallacy</a> where he further argued that good influence wasn't necessarily good using the example of pushy salespeople.  I don't know if you've read his blog or not.

Thanks again for joining the discussion.   Mike...