Last spring, I wrote about how small business owners in Merced County, Calif., were pushing to jump start the local economy. I recently heard from one of those entrepreneurs, Ken Myers, owner of Delhi Mini Storage. I was inspired by his spirit, and hope you are too.

Six months since I met him, Myers has seen his business pick up, and his new two-year-old storage facility has grown to 34% occupied from 18%. But his bank has informed him that his $4.2 million construction loan, which was originally supposed to be rolled over into a 30-year loan in June 2010, will not be refinanced. “So our business is improving,” says Myers, “but I’ll still probably lose it all.” In order to save his company, Myers is considering selling one of his two storage buildings and is trying to secure funds to build a billboard on his property, which he hopes will generate advertising income.

To make ends meet in the meantime, he’s taken a job driving 18-wheelers for a local trucking company while his wife and daughter run the office. Myers knows that without refinancing help from the banks he will lose his business. It seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. But he still hasn’t soured on entrepreneurship. “I’m 52 years old, but I can drive a truck and save some money,” he says. “If I lose this business I’ll start a new company. It won’t be as easy as it was 30 years ago, but I can still do it.”

The Economist owes much of its popularity to its knack for challenging conventional wisdom. In a recent column, it applied its contrarian mindset to the question of what kinds of leaders make the best CEOs, making the case that what the world needs now are more "raging egomaniacs" and "tightly wound empire-builders" rather than the "faceless" and "anonymous" bosses running so many companies today — "bland and boring men and women who can hardly get themselves noticed at cocktail parties."

The crux of The Economist's argument relies on what's known as the Great Man Theory of History. After trumpeting the virtues of business geniuses such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lou Gerstner, and Jack Welch, it then generalizes from this handful of larger-than-life moguls: "The best ambassadors for business are the outsize figures who have changed the world and who feel no need to apologise for themselves or their calling."

It's an intriguing essay and a good read. It's also a false choice — and a bad reading of history. For one thing, when it comes to larger-than-life CEOs, I can name as many scoundrels and failures as I can geniuses and world-changers. There's a reason Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind titled their bestseller on the Enron disaster The Smartest Guys in the Room, and it goes beyond the criminality those deeply flawed executives displayed. That familiar phrase captures the mindset too many of us expect even our most honest leaders to display — the assumption that being "in charge" means having all the answers. In simpler times, fierce personal confidence, a sense of infallibility as a leader, might have been be a calling card of success. Today it is a warning sign of failure, whether from bad judgment, low morale among disillusioned colleagues, or sheer burnout from the pressures of always having to be right.

That's not a case (and here's the false choice) for aiming low or being dull. The best executives I've met understand that there is a vast difference between advancing big, exciting, important goals — aspiring to change the game in your field — and assuming that you know best how to achieve those goals. Sure, great leaders champion new ideas and disruptive points of view — they have vision. But that doesn't mean they have to see the future on their own.

Just because you're in charge doesn't mean you have to have all the answers. Real business geniuses don't pretend they know everything.

To be sure, it's easier to divide leaders into either-or categories: risk-takers vs. bureaucrats, those with ambition vs. those with humility. Fortune just named Steve Jobs its CEO of the Decade — and while it's hard to argue with the choice, it's even harder to reproduce his talents. The problem with trumpeting the virtues of one-of-a-kind geniuses like Steve Jobs is that — duh — there is only one of them! Memo to The Economist: It's not a good idea to urge CEOs to emulate leaders whose success is, almost by definition, impossible to copy.

Keith Sawyer, a creativity guru at Washington University in St. Louis, has literally written the book on where good ideas come from. In Group Genius, he explains how few leaders are prepared to recognize the messy and hard-to-manage truth about the real logic of business success. Many (perhaps most) executives subscribe to what Sawyer calls script-think — "the tendency to think that events are more predictable than they really are." In fact, he says, "Innovation emerges from the bottom up, unpredictably and improvisationally, and it's often only after the innovation has occurred that everyone realizes what's happened. The paradox is that innovation can't be planned, it can't be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge."

Harriet Rubin, one of the great innovators in business-book publishing, and an accomplished author in her own right, uses different language to make a similar point about leadership and innovation. "Freedom is actually a bigger game than power," she reminds executives who are eager to make their mark in the world. "Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash."

The most effective leaders no longer want the job of solving their organization's biggest problems or identifying its best opportunities on their own. Instead, they recognize that the most powerful ideas can come from the most unexpected places: the quiet genius buried deep inside the organization, the collective genius that surrounds the organization, the hidden genius of customers, suppliers, and other constituencies who would be eager to share what they know if only they were asked. For companies, and the CEOs at their helms, those are the smartest (and most sustainable) sources of greatness.

How sad to hear the news that Jeanne-Claude, the feisty collaborator and companion to artist Christo, has died. I had the chance to meet the couple just over a year ago when they were honored, in something of a surprise choice, with a "Great Negotiator" award by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

What became clear in the public forum hosted for the award was that Jeanne-Claude, much more than Christo, was the better half at negotiation — and that it made all the difference to their work. Think what it takes to stage a large-scale art installation, however briefly, on land you do not own and for the most hard to describe reasons. The Gates in New York's Central Park (2005) — arguably the couple's most famous effort — came to pass only after 26 years of seeking permits from, and being rebuffed by, New York state and local leaders. Even more politicized was the campaign to wrap the Pont Neuf in Paris, which required approval from two leaders, President Francois Mitterand and Parisian Mayor Jacques Chirac, who on principle, in Jeanne-Claude's words, "never agreed on anything." Though the project was a triumph, it was the one the artists called their most difficult. "They were playing ping-pong," Jeanne-Claude recalled, "and we were the ball."

Less calculating, perhaps but more obdurate, were the ranchers Jeanne-Claude had to bring around to Christo's vision for Running Fence in Marion County. "We needed 59 separate contracts with landholders," she explained. "And they had no reason to want to work with us." Rather than throw up her arms, Jeanne-Claude seemed to relish the challenge. One day, having yet another coffee in yet another kitchen, she found a rancher suspicious of her motives. Why embark on such a project if not for some gain? Leaving the house, she spotted a beautiful flower bed and exclaimed over her host's gardening. She turned to him then, as though struck by a question: "But what is it good for?"

When he paused, then laughed, she knew she had his support. "Honey," he said, "I get the message."

The greatness of Jeanne-Claude's negotiating was, in the end, not that she and Christo got their way at the bargaining table, but that they got so many millions of people to experience the world, at least a part of it and for a little while, on their terms.

It was Robert Mnookin, a law professor at Harvard, who pushed for a "Great Negotiator" award to be given to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It meant taking a more expansive view of negotiation than usual, but that seemed appropriate. Negotiation is pervasive in human activity, he noted, not just in business deal-making. Indeed, all of life is wrapped in it.