Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities

How leaders can take the moral risks necessary to create ＂masterpieces＂--admirable, distinctive, and high-achieving businesses that create meaningful lives for customers, employees, and themselves.

In Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas show how the humanities can help leaders create profitable, masterpiece organizations. Such organizations, they assert, are ones that possess the emotional and moral sensibilities of an artist, the wisdom of a statesperson, and the technical know-how of commerce. The authors draw on the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bernard Williams, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli to conceptualize moral risk-taking, and then on the actions of Churchill, Madam C. J. Walker, Anita Roddick, Jeff Bezos, and others to show how the humanities can help create admirable businesses today.

As management consultants and educators steeped in the humanities themselves, the authors discuss their experiences helping business leaders achieve successful masterpieces that bring good lives to many. After describing our contemporary business environment and examples of leaders who have created masterpiece organizations, the book turns to the basic skills of masterpiece creation: managing moods, building trust, listening for difference, and speaking truth to power. Then come the senior skills: moral risk-taking and creating a masterpiece organizational culture, strategy, and leadership style. Last, the authors explain why their leaders build an economy of gratitude.

A culturally ambitious and refreshing read, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation is an invaluable volume for leaders of every stripe who wish to act daily with moral imagination.

Charles Spinosa is a management consultant with more than 25 years of experience. His consulting portfolio ranges from start-ups to Global 1000 companies. He is coauthor of Disclosing New Worlds (MIT Press).

Matthew Hancocks has over 25 years of consulting and coaching experience for growth businesses and market leaders from biotech to wind farms, insurance to logistics, and national heritage to temporary staffing.

Haridimos Tsoukas is Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management, University of Cyprus, and Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He is the author of Philosophical Organization Theory.