Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking

by Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, Haridimos Tsoukas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262048965
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.31(w) x 9.31(h) x 1.16(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface: Why Should We See Leadership as Masterpiece Creation? ix

Introduction 1
1 Leaders as Masterpiece Creators: Churchill and Madam Walker 15
2 Philosophy, Literature, History, and a Leader’s Good Life 35
3 The Unnatural Acts of Managing Moods on the Way to Creating Masterpieces 65
4 Trust at First Sight and Listening for Difference 79
5 Truth First 89
6 Safety, Moral Risk-Taking, and Developing the Warrior Spirit to Change Moral Orders 105
7 Designing an Organizational Culture Masterpiece 125
8 Masterpiece Strategy: Creating a New Moral Order through Morally Risky Commitments 151
9 Turning Your Style of Leadership into a Masterpiece 183
10 Is Masterpiece-Creating Leadership a Return to Heroic Leadership? 201

Acknowledgments 221
Notes 223
Index 261

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Leadership as Masterpiece Creation reveals the creative moral struggle that comes with building up and running a business that almost all books on business ignore or mischaracterize as bravura. It speaks to the heart and soul of leadership.”
—Imamu Tomlinson, Chief Executive Officer, Vituity
 
“The great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt argues that a new fact of history emerges in the Italian Renaissance. For the first time, great Renaissance cities like Florence, Venice, Padua, and others extend beyond the vicious tendencies of their predecessors, to something nobler and healthier. In earlier periods of history, the existence of a state was founded simply on the power of its leaders to maintain it. In the Italian Renaissance, by contrast, the state becomes a work of art. Drawing on this metaphor, longtime management consultant and former Renaissance scholar Charles Spinosa, with his coauthors Matthew Hancocks and Haridimos Tsoukas, offers a vision of leadership as masterpiece creation. Like the cities of Renaissance Italy, organizational masterpieces are worthy of admiration by diverse communities. But each is different from the others, setting forth a whole, distinctive moral vocabulary with which to envision the goods of existence. In a book that wears its erudition lightly, Spinosa, Hancocks, and Tsoukas draw on a vast range of examples from twentieth- and twenty-first-century businesses, plus a genuinely humanistic sense of the way art, literature, and history can teach us about moral valence and riskiness, to offer a readable and provocative account of leadership as a deeply significant form of art.”
—Sean Dorrance Kelly, coauthor (with Hubert Dreyfus) of All Things Shining


“It is not easy to combine deep philosophical ideas with the world of commerce. But by using highly creative examples from the world of businesses and organizations, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation makes sophisticated philosophical ideas come to life in a way that is rare and delightful. We need more philosophers engaged in the business world and this book can serve as inspiration for just that.”
—Christian Madsbjerg, co-founder of Red Associates and author of Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World
 
“If ‘thought-provoking’ has become an exhausted term on the back covers of books, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation does a good job revitalizing the sentiment. Oftentimes while reading, I hear myself thinking ‘that’s not a masterpiece’, ‘this is not leadership’ and am thereby convinced that this is a volume that brings me to a place for learning leadership: the unabating critique of the reflective practice in which my ‘self’ is formed. You should read and discover what that place is for you.”
—Daniel Hjorth, Lund University, Sweden, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
 
“A superlative of its kind. This book provides an excellent analysis of the nature and construction of effective leadership. Great art and business do share a common canvas. Ideas start as a sketch; the masterpiece is created by bringing skills and resources perfectly together. Trial and error for sure! Caravaggio and Jobs  lived with uncertainty, exploited different thinking, and took risks to achieve greatness.  Aspiring leaders should read this book.”
—Mike Hobday, Chief Executive, AntWorks Group