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Far be it from me to accuse the Great Grey Lady, the New York Times, of being provincial, but here I go. The article titled "C.E.O. Evolution Phase 3" that appeared in the Sunday Times is about as provincial an article as I've seen. Here's a substantive quote.

"Has the time come for C.E.O. Version 3.0? The first iteration made its mark in the 1990s, as chief executives like Sanford I. Weill, Gerald M. Levin, John F. Welch Jr. and Michael Eisner built empires, not to mention their profiles, at the companies they ran: Citigroup, Time Warner, GE and Disney. When the shares deflated earlier this decade after the burst of the tech bubble and various corporate scandals, a new cadre moved in: the Fix-it Men. They were lower-key leaders like Charles O. Prince III of Citigroup and Richard D. Parsons of Time Warner, whose job it was to repair the excesses and mistakes of their predecessors. Now, management experts and longtime watchers of corporate America say the current environment demands, and is attracting, yet another kind of chief executive: the team builder."

Wow. I bet you didn't know that there weren't any US CEOs worth mentioning before 1990.

Jack Welch, as good as he was, didn't spring full-blown from the brow of Zeus. GE shaped him long before he shaped GE.

Welch followed a man in the CEO role who was the most admired business person in America, Reg Jones, and who had a style about as different from Welch's as you can imagine. Both of those men stood in a tradition of GE chief executives that includes Ralph Cordiner and Charles E. "Electric Charlie" Wilson.

And let's not forget Charles Coffin. He was GE's president a century ago. He called the people who worked with him "associates" back then, something many gurus seem to think is a mark of enlightened 21st Century leadership.

All of those people came before the 1990 cutoff. But the article ignores effective leaders from the period of 1990 to the present who don't fit the profile of the various versions of CEO leadership. Otherwise, it seems, Lou Gerstner or Bill Gates might have some lessons to teach about leading large companies.

Every CEO mentioned is from a public company. CEOs of private companies like Charles Koch of Koch Industries and Ricardo Semler of Semco don't seem worth talking about, despite their records.

In addition to stopping in 1990, this article also stops at the water's edge. Everyone in this article, CEOs and management professors both, are American. Surely there might be some business leaders from other countries we could mention. What about Ratan Tata? Or how about Katsuaki Watanabe who heads that car company called Toyota?

In today's world, our models of good leadership need to come from wherever good leadership is being done. They need to come from the entire sweep of history, not from the time since today's management professors left graduate school.

That's the really scary part of this. The people quoted in this article are designing the curricula for schools like the Yale School of Management. Jeffrey Sonnefeld tells us that "the dean and faculty threw out the old first-year curriculum that emphasized individual disciplines like finance and marketing and replaced it with a team-oriented approach, with professors teaching these subjects jointly."

This reminded me of that common wisdom about generals planning for the last war. Remember the Maginot Line?

After World War I, the French, based on what they learned from that war, constructed giant line of fortifications facing Germany. But when the Germans went to war with France, von Bock's Army Group B ran around the line and the Luftwaffe flew over it. It took the Germans slightly more than a month to take Paris.

You can't create a leadership curriculum based on current fads and myopic historical perspective and expect it to be successful. You'll never succeed at creating leaders for a particular future. The future is an unknowable moving target.

The best we can do is promote people likely to succeed at leadership. Then train them with the best we know about getting results and leading people and offer them opportunities to grow and develop. Those leaders will become the leaders of that future we can't imagine.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.