The paper examines the increased interest among leadership writers in the issue of corporate strategy and corporate culture. Academic, consultant, and practitioner literature has increasingly focused on the way in which leadership constitutes effective organizations through shaping values and culture. This has led leadership studies away from the examination of the micro-processes of group formation with its concomitant problems of measurement and analysis and towards the consideration of the role of senior management in leadership. However, the paper rgues, that there has not yet been sufficient critical analysis of the role of leadership in these circumstances. It is argued that corporate leadership of this sort needs to be understood as a specific set of discourses and practices which has particular conditions of possibility. These are located in the changing nature of industry and management in the current era. It is argued that in order to advance, leadership studies need to problematize the discourse of 'leaders" themselves, rather than accepting them as adequate accounts of how organizations work.