a council-led tribe winning a world is the exception, not the rule.
As Guts said, there isnt a one-size-fits-all solution.
In my personal opinion the most likely situation to work is 1 leader, with advisors/council to delegate tasks to. This reduces bottlenecks in the decision making to just the founder. This should be the default leadership structure for all tribes, then adjust to suit.
The problem with that structure is that the leader has to be willing to let others take glory, be willing to listen to their advisors, but also willing to override them or make decisions without them when the situation allows. They also have to be willing to power through the crap parts of the game.
In the case of the council-led tribe i referred to in my last post the way it came about was 1 leader got the tribe set up and on a path to greatness, then went inactive for about a week. When he came back he passed leadership on to a friend, that friend then proceeded to destroy the tribe by stealing claimed vills, preventing tribemates from attacking enemy around him (that he would not attack either), waiting for tribemates to kill enemies and then moving in to take the vills, and claiming every single internal for himself. The council was forced to stage a coup when players started leaving the tribe so that they could attack the leader. After that noone trusted a single leader, so the council kept it between them. there were 4 core council memebers, with 2-3 advising council members. This was in a 200 member tribe (this was in the days where that was normal). The council returned the tribe to the path to greatness and ended up taking out the 3 larger tribes allied against us. That council came pretty close to implosion however as two members (myself being on of them) kept butting heads, and one would rant and rave in private messages to random tribemembers which completely undermined the leadership of the entire council, and that is how most councils fail, they cant agree, then the arguements spill into the tribe and sour everyone. Or the other extreme where they just dont make any decisions to avoid arguements.
I think there is one other leadership structure worse than WOWs, and i had it last world i played, the founder was not on council, and didnt want to be, but if they disagreed with the leadership they would demote everyone (the founder had 3 villages with no intention of getting more, and was the 2nd smallest member). When this happened after a simple misunderstanding of a comment from a non-council member, it broke the tribe, the leadership and council left along with the best members to form a tribe where the leaders were allowed to lead
