Leadership as Masterpiece Creation

What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking

Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, Haridimos Tsoukas

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780262378406
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: Why Should We See Leadership as Masterpiece Creation?
• Introduction
• 1 Leaders as Masterpiece Creators: Churchill and Madam Walker
• 2 Philosophy, Literature, History, and a Leader’s Good Life
• 3 The Unnatural Acts of Managing Moods on the Way to Creating Masterpieces
• 4 Trust at First Sight and Listening for Difference
• 5 Truth First
• 6 Safety, Moral Risk-Taking, and Developing the Warrior Spirit to Change Moral Orders
• 7 Designing an Organizational Culture Masterpiece
• 8 Masterpiece Strategy: Creating a New Moral Order through Morally Risky Commitments
• 9 Turning Your Style of Leadership into a Masterpiece
• 10 Is Masterpiece-Creating Leadership a Return to Heroic Leadership?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index