Pieter Vermeulen

Many studies in the management discipline have focused either on what it takes to be a business leader (normative) or what business leaders do (empirical), but little is known about the development of business leadership competence.  The contribution of this paper lies in its use of life-stories of highly accomplished business leaders as data, and its dynamic design, focusing on life-long competency development.  This paper proposes that highly accomplished business leaders encounter specific ‘formative events’, engendering learningto-learn agility, throughout their careers that play central roles in the development of their social identities, and their capacities to deal with change through the use of narrative analysis methodology and clustering techniques.  The paper concludes that leadership competence of successful business leaders is developed through the occurrence of formative events that enable them to define their sense of identity, build their capacity to deal with change, and become agile in their ability to learn.