TO JUDGE by the following smattering of book titles, I sense that publishers are mining a rich seam. The 9 Laws of Natural Leadership; Leadership A-Z; The Inner Work of Leaders; The Tao of Personal Leadership; Coaching for Leadership; Hard Wired Leadership; Leading at the Edge of Chaos. Or, how about Frankenstein’s Manager (subtitled Leadership’s Missing Links)?

The corporate world is obsessed with leadership. What makes a fine leader? Why do successes such as Jack Welch and Richard Branson become cult figures? Why are psychologists still squabbling over whether great leaders are born or made? Mark Van Vugt, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent, says we have been getting this leadership stuff all wrong, none more so than the City. Instead of gawping myopically at leaders, he says, we should scrutinise those in their wake. “There has been too much of a focus on leaders,” Van Vugt insists. “Instead, we must understand the needs and anxieties of followers, because followers create the space in which leaders emerge.” Freud understood that, without followers, leaders would not exist, which led him to write of the “primitive horde”.

Scientists presume that leadership is an ancient evolutionary phenomenon, because groups of chimpanzees, our closest relatives, contain leaders and followers. This provides Van Vugt with his starting point.

For most of the past two million years, he says, we lived in small, nomadic bands. From these bands, leaders emerged; they decided such matters as when the groups would move on. Groups with leaders fared better than those without, and this is how leadership came to be a universal feature of human societies.

Nonetheless, says Van Vugt, the groups remained relatively egalitarian. “Leaders emerged to deal with relatively small, specialised problems. They may have acquired a little extra status or mating opportunities, but they didn’t rule their group’s lives. There was no clear, formalised leadership and presumably this is our natural way of thinking about leaders and leadership.”

Contrast this, he says, with the way CEOs are recruited: “Business leaders are often appointed by a board of directors, in a top-down way, not the bottom-up way that our ancestors preferred.” In short, the autocratic leadership often seen in the City is nothing like the soft, fuzzy leadership of our evolutionary yesteryear, and our ancient brains don’t much care for it. This might explain why there are so many failures in business leadership.

So should employees choose the new boss, perhaps from among themselves? Van Vugt thinks so: “We’d get rid of corruption, nepotism, cheating and stealing. When executives are so far removed from the people they are leading, they don’t have legitimacy.”

By the way, I like the professor’s suggestions for keeping domineering leaders in check by using “gossip, ridicule and disobedience”. Bosses, you have been warned.

• THIS WEEK I have mostly been thinking about . . . the possibility that superstring theory may be beautiful but useless mathematics, and whether my £6 sparkly England top from Tesco will survive a third wash. Not until last week did I pause to consider the inconvenience of salt shakers that do not dispense properly.

  Now scientists in India might have found an answer to the salty quandary — by growing round salt crystals. As any junior chemist who has grown crystals in her airing cupboard can testify, salt, or sodium chloride, comes in tiny cubic crystals (because that’s the most efficient way to pack the sodium and chloride ions together). Unfortunately, salt crystals can become glued together by the growth of “intercrystalline bridges”. One result is lumpy salt that won’t exit a shaker; a more serious consequence for the food and chemicals industry is “caking”, in which tonnes of clogged salt interrupt production.

  It is much trickier to stack spheres — they tend to roll off each other. Dr Pushpito Ghosh and colleagues at the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute have found that adding glycine, an amino acid, to the crystallisation process slows it down. Instead of forming cubes, the crystals become 12-sided rhombic dodecahedrons, which are near-spherical shapes. The glycine can be washed off; the result is free-flowing salt. The research will be published next month in Crystal Growth & Design.

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