“My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management,” reads the back cover of Alex Ferguson’s new book, Leading .

It’s hard to think of a business idea that has had more sticking power than the distinction between leadership and management. And, as with most simple but powerful notions, the dichotomy is part caricature, part resonant truth. We have come to use it as a shorthand to distinguish the noble from the slavish, the outstanding from the ordinary, the good from the bad. “The manager is a copy; the leader is an original,” said Warren Bennis, the business scholar.

Archetypes persist because they convey valuable lessons, but they are myths nonetheless and it’s instructive to trace this one back to its origins.