Management and Leadership - Startup versus Established?

I like Seth, his blog is in my Google Reader. His books are good, too. He recently wrote about leadership and management. It inspired me to come up with a question:

Does the relationship between leadership/management and startup/established business exists in a meaningful and measurable way?

I think it exists, and I'm sure it's meaningful, but I'm not sure it's measurable. How can you measure leadership or management in the way that Seth describes them? There's no easy metrics that spring to my mind. It's mostly one of those, "You'll know it when you see it" kind of things. That's too bad.

There's probably a whole industry out there claiming that they can offer insight into how to perform this measurement. These consultants probably make good money. Sadly, it's most likely all for naught. Unless you can see it plain as day, the person you're looking at isn't a leader.