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You would think “leadership” is popular because it needs to be popular. If we had to quantify it, how would we do so? Lets look at the number of books that are written on the subject. A search on Amazon.com for “Leadership” yields 98,449 results.

Search results for “Leadership” on Amazon.com

A search on Google.com yields 456 million results. Upon a whim, I used http://books.google.com/ngrams/ to find out how many times the work “leadership” was used in the books digitized by Google. This is what I got:

Google ngram for “Leadership”

I was positive that “leadership” is more popular than “management” but to my surprise, I got the following results in the same site:

Google ngram for “Management” and “Leadership”

Now if you think about it, people read about topics other than “leadership” and “management.” I chose some random topics and here is what I got:

Google ngram for various words.

You can draw you own conclusions! I know you will see the logical fallacy right away, but it is an amusing exercise nevertheless. (Let me know what you think in the comments!)

The point is, attempts to quantify can be interesting, but don’t get carried away!