When Arthur asked me to write a foreword to his book Religion and Contemporary Management: Moses as a Model for Effective Leadership, I was honored and a little surprised. Although I have spent the past 30 years studying and teaching the various facets of leadership and spent several years teaching at a Jesuit university, Loyola Marymount University, I'm not exactly a religious scholar. My focus has been on the modern history of leadership rather than ancient practices.

As I contemplated further, though, I began to ask myself, “Are things really that different?” For thousands of years, there have been effective leaders and corrupt ones. Whether a leader is in politics, business or religion, the dynamics are the same. People are the same. The blazing scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Volkswagen and too many other companies illustrate that the age-old battle between right and wrong still rages on.

In the wake of these scandals, we don't need more standards-based guidelines or accounting-based rules to cover every possible situation. Instead, we need leaders of character and integrity. We need leaders who don't put their own egos and greed ahead of the welfare of the company and its employees. We need principled leaders who make ethically based decisions while considering how both other people and the environment will be affected by their actions. Frankly, we need more leaders like Moses.

Although people and their characters haven't changed much, the demands of leadership have increased. Perhaps today more than ever, people have extraordinarily high expectations of leaders. Leaders are expected to be decisive, strong, commanding, ethical, honest, fair, balanced, thoughtful and just about any other redeeming quality you can think of.

In addition to these personal qualities, leaders are also expected to have a skill set that is above and beyond that of the people they lead. If the people are negotiators, the leader is expected to be the best negotiator. If the people are athletes, the leader is expected to have knowledge and understanding in every aspect of the sport. If the people are in academics, the leader is expected to be an expert in the field in addition to leading. Is it really fair to expect all those qualities to be present in one person?