I first came across this notion of the invisibility of good leadership back in 1969. I had just started working in the laboratory of a chemical company based in Hamburg, and I was given the task of learning how to glue things together. To glue my mind together, too; I was 19 years old, on my own for the first time and far from my home in a small village.

Predictably, I visited the shops I’m most addicted to: bookshops. There I met Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book, The Peter Principle (HarperBusiness reprint, 2011). It was love at first sight. Maybe I needed to fall in love with some “sound principle.”

The love affair further developed after discovering C. Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law or the Pursuit of Progress (Penguin Books, 1986), as well as other books, movies, songs, columns, and cartoons that—albeit some more lightheartedly than others—strove to answer the “leadership question.”

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