You may think this is an odd claim from Think Training Development Limited, a company that specializes in Leadership Training, but it got them on a site with a million readers so, like a magician exposing trade secrets in a tell-all book, it may just work out.

Picture the scene: your company is not doing as well as it could, your people need some direction; some motivation and you're the person to deliver it. If only you knew how.

You need some help, so you book yourself on to an expensive Leadership Training Course.

You enter the second rate hotel where the event is being held and a name sticker is slapped on to your lapel. You check out who else is on the course but there is no-one from your particular industry. You're given a big, shiny manual that is mostly full of blank pages for you to make notes, although, to be fair, it's peppered periodically with mysterious acronyms to help you remember how to be a captain of industry.

Then, best of all, you get to learn how to lead from the front from a guy who has never been out of the classroom long enough to know where the front is. You spend the rest of the day pondering the potential risks of death by PowerPoint and the journey home removing bits of glue from your suit where your name sticker has been.

You return to work to find your sales figures are down, your marketing team has gone AWOL and Sally from accounts is in your office, crying because her husband has left her.

You hurriedly leaf through your new manual to help you, but all you can see are unfathomable graphs and the Christmas shopping list you wrote while one of the other delegates was asking an interminably long and irrelevant question...

There's more, namely a big public relations effort by Think Training Development to tell you how THEY ARE NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER GUYS ... but let's just leave well enough alone and agree with them that leadership training courses do not work. Being a leader does.